Idea of justice amartya sen pdf download
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The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen ( Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 2009 496 pp., .95 cloth. The Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, born in 1933, is one of the most important public intellectuals of our age, an original thinker whose work transcends the standard disciplinary boundaries. His 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded for his work in welfare economics, but to describe him as an economist' (as the term is understood today) would be inaccurate. Better would be social philosopher or, better still, the old term political economist since the scope and range of Sen's work is directly comparable to that of such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practitioners of political economy as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. Indeed, Marx and especially Smith are key reference points for Sen, although it is Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than his Wealth of Nations to which Sen refers most often, and similarly it is Marx's more explicitly philosophical works rather than Capital that appeal to him.1 In the course of a stellar academic career, Sen has published more than two dozen books and countless articles. He taught at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, while on leave from writing his Ph. D. at Cambridge University and went on to teach at the Delhi School of Economics, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Harvard before being elected Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1998. In 2004 he returned to Harvard as Lamont University Professor, Professor of Economics and Philosophy. The combining of these two disciplines in the title of his chair speaks volumes. In 2009 Sen published a major book, The Idea of Justice, which summarizes and extends many of the most important themes he has developed over the last quarter century.2 But before giving an account of this work and its importance, it may be helpful to consider briefly.
Social justice: an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities? More than a matter of intellectual discourse, the idea of justice plays a real role in how—and how well—people live. And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind. The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen’s analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions. At the heart of Sen’s argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a “just society” really is. People of different persuasions—for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no-nonsense libertarians—might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.
The Idea of Justice is a 2009 book by economist Amartya Sen. Contents 1 Summary 2 Scholarly reception 3 References 4 External links Summary[edit] Sen's book is principally a critique and revision of John Rawls' basic ideas in A Theory of Justice (1971). Sen was a student of Rawls and the book is dedicated to his memory. One of Sen's main arguments is that the project of social justice should not be evaluated in binary terms, as either achieved or not. Rather, he claims that justice should be understood as existing to a matter of degree, and should correspondingly be evaluated along a continuum. Furthermore, he argues that we do not need a fully established abstract ideal of justice to evaluate the fairness of different institutions. He claims that we can meaningfully compare the level of justice in two institutions without positing an ideal, transcendental idea of justice. He names the opposite position institutional transcendentalism. Sen defends one of Rawls' most fundamental theoretical concepts: justice as fairness. Although this is a vague notion fraught with difficulties in any particular case, he nevertheless views it as one of Rawls' strongest insights while rejecting the necessity of Rawls' two principles of justice emerging from the Original position thought experiment in A Theory of Justice. Sen also draws heavily on Adam Smith and his first major work The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759 arguing that it is Smith's most important and unduly overlooked work. Scholarly reception[edit] The Idea of Justice has been described by The Economist as a commanding summation of Mr Sen’s own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being.[1] Sen delivered a lecture based on the book ( The Penguin Annual Lecture) in Kolkata on 5 August which was followed by a discussion with Barkha Dutt. References[edit] ^ The Economist, 6 August.