Front cover image for Development as freedom

Development as freedom

Amartya Sen (Author)
"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 by economic 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 enhancing individual 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 individual ability 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."--Provided by publisher
eBook, English, 2001
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001
1 online resource (xvi, 366 pages) : illustrations
9780307874290, 9780191027239, 9780191027246, 030787429X, 0191027235, 0191027243
936078527
Introduction: Development as freedom
The perspective of fredom
The ends and the means of development
Freedom and the foundations of justice
Poverty as capability deprivation
Markets, states, and social opportunity
The importane of democracy
Famines and other crises
Women's agency and social change
Population, rood and rreedom
Culture and human rights
Social choice and individual behavior
Individual freedom as a social commitment
"First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf ... 1999."
"First published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2001."