Development As Freedom

Amartya Sen had an unusual educational opportunity as a doctoral student. Trinity College in Cambridge awarded him its Prize Fellowship to spend four years investigating any subject. Sen chose to learn philosophy. Sen’s deep immersion in philosophy is one aspect of his perspective that enriches his thoughts and sets him apart from many other welfare economists. Much of Development as Freedom is a critique of the policymakers and economists who think only in terms of income without considering broader questions of people’s wellbeing or even why wealth is desirable.

Sen’s focus on freedom comes from an appreciation for the Anglo-American tradition of liberal philosophy, although he is quick to point out that its principles can be found in his native India—for example, in the religious toleration enjoined by the classical Buddhist emperor Ashoka. Sen explicitly engages with the liberalism of John Rawls, one of the most prominent democratic political philosophers of the 20th century. Sen co-taught a seminar with Rawls and Kenneth Arrow (who made significant contributions to the field of social choice theory) at Harvard in 1968-69. Both influenced Sen deeply. Rawls’s philosophy puts justice at the forefront of political and ethical concerns, with a strong emphasis on fairness. His “original position” thought experiment states that, when imagining the ideal society, a person has to conceive of it without knowing what position he or she would occupy in it. A society would only be fair if a person could accept the possibility of occupying the lowest rung. Rawls was optimistic about the ability of people to come together rationally to agree on core democratic principles and create a consensus, even if they had varied reasons for their values. This philosophy of democracy allows for tolerance, diversity, and some of the messiness of real political discourse. Sen’s optimism about forming consensus via public debate owes a large debt to Rawls.

Sen’s worldview grows from a long-standing and wider liberal concern with human rights to the belief that social justice requires people to be concerned about the poor and marginalized. Liberalism has deep roots, but it gained steam in the late-19th and 20th centuries as an impetus to global development. Its global reach can be seen in the creation of many global development initiatives after World War II and the groundbreaking U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

When Sen began his career in the 1950s, economic thought followed three main strands: Marxist (popular among many youth movements in newly independent countries such as Sen’s own India); Keynesian (which gave government an increased economic role while stopping short of socialism); and neoclassical (which championed free markets and combined the thoughts of Adam Smith with insights from utilitarianism and 19th-century liberalism). Sen’s background in philosophy allows him to tease out underlying philosophical assumptions in these different theories without fully subscribing to any of them. He has the greatest distance from Marxism; for Sen, free markets are a species of freedom to which he, as a liberal, would be committed to even if free markets did not usually function better than state-led command economies. Sen’s greatest affinity is for the original ideas of Adam Smith. He focuses on neglected aspects of Smith as a moral philosopher. This lets him challenge the caricature of Smith as a prophet of selfish human behavior. Sen’s version of Adam Smith is a liberal who believes in freedom and decries the ways the rich and powerful corrupt or deny that freedom in the marketplace. By bringing out historical nuances such as this, Sen moves beyond strict adherence to any particular contemporary economic ideology to embrace a pragmatic approach, borrowing from different strands of thought.

In short, Sen believes in freedoms as the measure of human wellbeing, including—but not limited to—the political and social liberties normally championed by liberalism. He values diversity and tolerance. He also values a range of economic liberties, such as the freedom to engage in transactions in the marketplace, freedom from hunger, and the free flow of information in business to create transparency. All these are connected and equally balanced. Practical economic results, especially ones that reduce inequality, could outweigh political freedoms in Sen’s system, but Sen argues that such cases are rare. Above all, he has faith in the human capacity for reason. He believes that if people are educated and allowed to engage in an open debate, and if the voices of those on the margins of society are heard, then values such as justice and fairness will emerge; people will agree on reasonable policies that increase others’ freedom. This faith in the democratic process dramatically underlines liberalism’s influence on Sen’s ideas.