Amartya Sen as a social and political theorist – on personhood, democracy, and ‘description as choice’

ABSTRACT

Economist-philosopher Amartya Sen's writings on social and political issues have attracted wide audiences. Section 2 introduces his contributions on: how people reason as agents within society; social determinants of people's (lack of) access to goods and of the effective freedoms and agency they enjoy or lack; and associated advocacy of self-specification of identity and high expectations for ‘voice’ and reasoning democracy. Section 3 considers his relation to social theory, his tools for theorizing action in society, and his limited degree of attention to work by sociologists and to capitalism and power structures. Section 4 characterizes a style marked by conceptual refinement, emphases on complexity and individuality, including personal individuality, and reformist optimism. Section 5 shows the features from Sections 3 and 4 at work in his conception of personhood that advocates freedom to make a reasoned composition of personal identity. Similarly, Section 6 addresses his conception of public reasoning and neglect of the sociology of democracy. It contrasts the ideal of a reasoning polity with features in many countries. Sen's programmes for critical autonomy in personhood and for reasoned politics play, nevertheless, a normic role, while his analytical formats help investigation of obstacles to more widespread agency, voice, and democratic participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• personhood
• identity
• deliberation
• capability approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Similarly, Sen's remarks on needs theory (e.g. 2013) do not connect to the needs literatures in psychology and social policy.

2 Here and often elsewhere Sen says more about the powerless than about powerholders and power-systems.

3 Zimmermann (2021) argues that pragmatist sociology is an equally important required base.

4 Slightly more frequently mentioned in The Argumentative Indian are a few social scientists whom Sen criticizes, such as Ashish Nandy and Samuel Huntington. His papers on social exclusion (Sen 2000) and culture in development (Sen 2004) are wider-ranging but still oriented more to institutional economics than to ‘social theory’.

5 Ragkousis (2023) questionably contends that Sen's extensive use of formal reasoning is in tension with this freedom- and learning-oriented perspective.

6 The distinguished Indian socio-economist C.T. Kurien contrasted his own careful specification of institutional context, as a precondition for worthwhile economic theorizing, with Sen's more abstracted approach (Kurien 1996). Sen defends

[a] general approach [that] can be used in many different ways, depending on the context and the information that is available. It is this combination of foundational analysis and pragmatic use that gives the capability [and entitlements] approach its extensive reach. (Sen 1999a, 86; my addition)

His case studies of hunger and food policy, for example, contain far more institutional specification than does his broad theorizing.

7 An example: ‘Farmer points to what he calls “structural violence”’, writes Sen (2005b, xiii), using quotation marks for the term coined by Johan Galtung back in the 1960s; and he continues to make this attribution (‘ … Farmer's notion of “structural violence”’, p. xv).

8 In contrast, Charles Lindblom, theorist of The Intelligence of Democracy (1965) in terms very similar to Sen's, moved on to consider also the profoundly undemocratic corporate and plutocratic capture of politics, in works like The Market System (2001).

9 See, e.g., remarks already in his 1988 interview with Richard Swedberg (Sen 1990, 260), on personal identity as a plurality of memberships.

10 Citing Parsons and Smelser (1956, 49).

11 Whereas Davis engages in depth with social theories (notably, about collective intentionality) in order to do so, Sen does not. His work is thus extended by Davis's.

12 Similarly, in ‘The Smallness Thrust Upon Us’ Sen writes that in ‘determining the relative importance of [our] diverse diversities, and … understanding the priorities between them … [t]hese choices cannot be settled – as some communitarians have claimed – as a matter of passive “discovery”’ (2015, 45). Is the ‘cannot’ here descriptive as well as normative?

13 Zimmermann (2021) traces this view back to John Dewey (‘for Dewey: being human means the capability to develop one's individuality’, p. 182), just as she traces Sen's usage of ‘capability’ to Dewey (Zimmermann 2018).

14 ‘ … I do not believe that, in general, dissociation of choice from reasoning is a sweeping characteristic of the world in which we live’ (Sen 2007, 343). This standpoint seems distant from much in modern psychology, neuroscience and behavioural research.

15 See Currie (2000), Banik (2007); also Sen's discussion of the role of ‘the local Bengal government’ (2009, 340) and the elected Bengal Assembly during the 1943 Bengal famine.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Des Gasper

Des Gasper is professor emeritus of Human Development, Development Ethics and Public Policy at the International Institute of Social Studies (The Hague), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. His publications include The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development (Edinburgh University Press 2004; SAGE India 2005) and Development Ethics (International Library of Essays in Public and Professional Ethics, Ashgate 2010 and Routledge 2016, co-edited with Asuncion Lera St. Clair).