Product Details

John Dunn - Times Higher Education Supplement

A work of striking intellectual ambition and unusual intellectual patience, tensely engaged in many different struggles and on a wide variety of levels. What it offers is not a set of simple and readily portable conclusions, or a means for reconciling the reader to a devastatingly imperfect historical world, but a sustained effort to clarify where the main imperfections come from, and what could, in principle, be done to alleviate them.

Social Development Issues

Sen's arguments about social choice are important. The first chapter of the book offers a straightforward and comprehensive account of the social choice approach and this discussion is extended in the Nobel Lecture that forms the second chapter of the book… [I]t should be widely consulted by social development scholars who need to understand rational choice liberalism and its relevance to social development.

Richard J. Arneson - American Political Science Review

Sen brings a hard-edged intellect to regions of thought usually regarded as slushy and amorphous...Anyone interested in the topics of freedom, equality, or justice would profit from a close reading of this book.

Alan Ryan - New York Review of Books

One of the most attractive qualities of Rationality and Freedom is an extraordinary intellectual good nature. Whenever he can express gratitude, Professor Sen does so; whenever he criticizes it is gently--and save on very rare occasions it is only after he has expressed his appreciation for the stimulus provided by the error he uncovers. It would be a poor return for what he offers us here to pretend that everything he writes is equally persuasive; for even when he is unpersuasive he provides intellectual pleasures that few writers can match.

Library Journal

Nobel Prize Winning economist Sen here argues that freedom and rationality go together and that freedom involves genuine opportunity; the absence of restraint is not enough. People must not be lulled into contentment with their lot by cultural norms or propaganda-as happens with the poor in India, for instance, who sometimes are not aware of their plight. Though Sen rejects moral relativism, he does argue that the freedom involves a choice of values, and he is suspicious when market theorists claim that the free market can solve all problems. As Sen acknowledges, his ideas go back to T.H. Green in the 19th century and build on the foundations of Kenneth Arrow in the 20th century. Some of the essays here have circulated for a while, but the ideas benefit from restatement; we can see why Sen, now master of Trinity College, Cambridge, won the Nobel prize. Still, one wishes that the prose could rise above the economic jargon and make the book accessible to those beyond academia.-Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Ont.

What People Are Saying

Sen's mastery in the fields of social choice, the foundations of welfare economics, and, more broadly, distributive ethics and the measurement problems associated with these fields is unquestioned.

What People Are Saying

Sen's mastery in the fields of social choice, the foundations of welfare economics, and, more broadly, distributive ethics and the measurement problems associated with these fields is unquestioned.

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents