Development as Freedom

by Amartya Sen

• ISBN13: 9780192893307
• ISBN10: 0192893300
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-01-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Academic UK

Summary

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another byeconomic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancingindividual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking 'What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individualability to live as we would like?' and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: Development as Freedom	p. 3
The Perspective of Freedom	p. 13
The Ends and the Means of Development	p. 35
Freedom and the Foundations of Justice	p. 54
Poverty as Capability Deprivation	p. 87
Markets, State and Social Opportunity	p. 111
The Importance of Democracy	p. 146
Famines and Other Crises	p. 160
Women's Agency and Social Change	p. 189
Population, Food and Freedom	p. 204
Culture and Human Rights	p. 227
Social Choice and Individual Behavior	p. 249
Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment	p. 282
Notes	p. 299
Index by Name	p. 353
Index by Subject	p. 361
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