Amartya Sen Coments

Progress in Development Studies 2,3 (2002) pp.
183–217
Development as freedom: the spaces

of Amartya Sen1
Stuart Corbridge
London School of Economics, UK and University of Miami, USA
Abstract: The field of development studies owes a great debt to Amartya Sen. This paper
reviews the strengths and weaknesses of Sen’s account of ‘development as freedom’. It considers
how Sen has developed his arguments in terms of four key ‘spaces’: what he calls the space of
economic or moral evaluation, and what I call the spaces of geography, culture and politics. If
there are problematic areas in Sen’s work, they lie in his treatments of authoritarian rule, of the
rights to difference of certain social groups, and of political power, and in the indeterminacy of
some of his policy recommendations.
Key words: authoritarianis m, development, difference, freedom, liberalism, spaces of

evaluation.
I Introduction
Amartya Kumar Sen is one of the great public intellectuals of our time. Born in 1933 and
brought up in Dhaka (now in Bangladesh), Sen’s childhood was marked not only by his
encounters with Rabindranath Tagore and other members of the Bengali intelligentsia,
but also by the horrors of the Great Bengal Famine and the Partition of India.2 Sen
continues to acknowledge the presence of these events in his life and work.
After attending Presidency College in Calcutta, Sen moved to England in 1953 and
read Economics at Cambridge University.3 In 1957 he submitted a Prize Fellowship dis-
sertation to Trinity College on the subject of ‘Choice of techniques’. A revised version of
that work was published by Blackwell in 1960. Thereafter, Sen published widely on
savings and capital in developing countries, on surplus labour in peasant economies,
on the relationship between farm size holdings and productivity in Indian agriculture,
and on the isolation paradox and social choice theory. This last body of work was
expanded in the 1970s when Sen left the Delhi School of Economics to take up a Chair
at the London School of Economics.4 Sen now developed his critique of forms of
Address for correspondence: University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA. Fax: 001 305 284 5430;
e-mail: corbridge@miami.edu
© Arnold 2002 10.1191/1464993402ps037r a

184 Development as freedom: spaces of A. Sen
economic evaluation which relied on utilitarianism or libertarianism, or on the work of

John Rawls on the distribution of primary goods. This led him to insist upon the
importance of the ‘expansion of freedom . . . both as the primary end and as the
principal means of development’ (Sen, 2000: xii).
The practical significance of this insight became apparent in Sen’s work on the causes
of famine and on questions of gender bias in development. Much of this work was
carried out when Sen was Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford
University and when he held chairs in economics and philosophy at Harvard
University as the Lamont University Professor.5 Sen also benefited from his collabora-
tions with Jean Drèze on hunger and public action, and the particularities of Indian
development, and with James Foster on the measurement of economic inequality.6 In
addition, while it is a matter of pride to Sen that ‘I have never counseled any
government, preferring to place my suggestions and critiques – for what they are worth
– in the public domain’ (Sen, 2000: xiv), it is clear that his work has been shaped by his
involvements with organizations including the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization (UNIDO; Sen’s work with Partha Dasgupta and Stephen Marglin formed
the basis of that institution’s guidelines for project analysis),7 the International Labour
Office (his books Employment, technology and development (1975) and Poverty and famines
(1981) grew out of work for the World Employment Programme of the International
Labour Organization (ILO)), the World Institute for Development Economics Research
of the United Nations University (from which came the work on the political economy
of hunger) and, of course, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
(which incorporated aspects of Sen’s work on the evaluation of development into its
Human Development Reports).8 Recognition of the importance of Sen’s work grew
again in the 1980s and 1990s, and led to his election to numerous visiting professorships
and to his assumption of the Presidencies of the Development Studies Association, the
American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association and the
International Economic Association. In 1998 Sen was appointed Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and in the same year he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize
for Economic Science.
Sen won his Prize for his contributions to welfare economics, and it is significant that
his achievement is not confined to the study of poorer countries. The Nobel Committee
specifically mentioned his work on aggregating individual preferences into social
choices. But the same Committee also commended Sen’s work on poverty and the
causes of famine, and it is clear that his work has a resonance that extends far beyond
development economics or even economics more broadly. One might say, indeed, that
Sen’s career since the time of his Prize Fellowship has helped to define the broader field
of development studies, and that his contributions on capital theory, technical choice,
project evaluation, poverty and inequality, peasant labour systems, famine, and capa-
bilities, democracy and freedom have had more impact upon the discipline than have
those of any other individual. This is true, furthermore, not just directly but also
indirectly: Sen’s work has prompted important debates on the measurement of
inequality, on the causes of famine, on capital and savings, and on the role of nonmarket
institutions, amongst several others.
For the most part these debates have been constructive and well mannered,9 and they
have picked up on (or anticipated) Sen’s observation – made in respect of a broader
issue – that: ‘There is no escape from the necessity of critical scrutiny’ (Sen, 2000: 126).
S. Corbridge 185
This paper hopes to contribute to this process by asking questions about certain of the
‘spaces’ that characterize the work of Amartya Sen. The main body of the paper begins
with the spaces of economic or moral evaluation that stand at the heart of Sen’s work –
the spaces that Sen signals most readily and explicitly. As I suggested above, Sen’s work
on poverty and famines is derived from his account of the relevance of different spaces
for the evaluation of inequality and social exclusion. His insistence on the foundation-
al nature of the spaces of capabilities and substantive freedoms is linked to a continuing
critique of other possible spaces (utility, household welfare, primary goods) where
equalities or inequalities can be measured and compared. It is this insistence and
critique that makes possible his more grounded interventions in the realm of social
affairs.
The third part of the paper takes note of some objections to Sen’s work that have
taken shape within the framework of economic or moral space. But most of this section
is devoted to a consideration of how Sen uses geographical space to support his
arguments. Because geographical space is conceived by Sen in empirical rather than
abstract terms, much of the discussion turns on the ways in which Sen reads particular
geographical regions: most obviously Bengal and Kerala, but also India and China, the
East Asian newly industrialized countries and even Western Europe and the USA. I
consider the robustness of Sen’s empirical claims (or some of them), and consider
whether an alternative reading of these geographical spaces might provoke new
questions for Sen’s account of ‘development as freedom’.
The fourth and fifth parts of the paper continue in a similar vein, but have regard for
the spaces of culture and politics respectively (and allowing for an evident overlap
between them). In Section IV I consider the strong commitment to individual
substantive freedoms that Sen brings to bear in his readings of culture and the
formation of social norms. Sen shares with Martha Nussbaum, another long-time col-
laborator, a deeply rooted faith in the universalism of certain human values and
needs.10 This faith guards Sen against an amoral politics of indifference, or trite obser-
vations about so-called Confucian or other ethical systems. Moreover, if it might be
argued that Sen is not fully attentive to claims to difference on a social group basis, it
cannot be said that he is opposed to a politics of toleration that places its faith in full
and frank public discussion. Unlike some proponents of a politics of postdevelopment,
however, Sen is sceptical of claims to difference that are based on presumptions of
insularity in a globalizing world. He insists that the ‘culturally fearful . . . underestimate
our ability to learn from elsewhere without being overwhelmed by that experience’
(Sen, 2000: 243).
In Section V I review the accounts of economic and social power that inform Sen’s
work. In particular, I consider whether his account of the spaces of politics is adequate
to its task in terms of specifying determinate policy outcomes, and in understanding the
need for and importance of collective actions. I also consider whether Sen is sufficient-
ly attentive to the problems arising from highly uneven distributions of economic,
political and cultural power. Why should we suppose that a liberal or Fabian politics is
sufficiently vigorous to deal with these inequalities? Section VI, which is a brief
conclusion, closes the paper. Throughout, the discussion draws heavily on the recent
summary and partial development of Sen’s thought that can be found in his lectures on
Development as freedom (2000; hereinafter DAF). This is partly for convenience, however,
and the paper makes reference to Sen’s collected papers on Resources, values and
development (Sen, 1997a; RVD) and on Choice, welfare and measurement (Sen, 1982; CWM),
as well as to his books on Poverty and famines (Sen, 1981p PAF), Hunger and public action
(Drèze and Sen, 1989; HPA), India: economic development and social opportunity (Drèze and
Sen, 1995; IEDSO), On economic inequality (Foster and Sen, 1997; OEI, and Inequality
reexamined (Sen, 1995; IR), and various journal papers and newspaper articles.
II The spaces of economic evaluation
The bases of Sen’s account of development as freedom are to be found in his under-
standing of the proper spaces for economic evaluation. Sen’s analyses of poverty and
famines, or of the importance of capabilities in securing substantive human freedoms,
follow directly from his critique of contending accounts of the meaning of development
and the measurement of economic success.
This has been so for the best part of 30 years, if not for longer. A significant part of
Sen’s work in the 1970s involved a critique not just of utilitarianism and libertarianism ,
but also of John Rawls’s account of social justice (as presented, primarily, in his A theory
of justice: Rawls, 1971, but see also Rawls, 1958). The main arguments can be briefly
summarized. Sen has objected to utilitarianism on the ground that it provides for a
space of economic evaluation that is insensitive to human difference and thus to the
distinct needs and capabilities of individual human agents. As he put it in the Radcliffe
Lectures of 1972: ‘The trouble with this approach is that maximizing the sum of
individual utilities [pleasure, happiness, welfare] is supremely unconcerned with the
interpersonal distribution of that sum. This should make it particularly unsuitable for
measuring or judging inequality’ (OEI: 16). This is especially the case when it is
combined with an insistence on Pareto optimality, or the idea that the utility (or welfare)
of anyone should not be raised if it leads to a reduction in the utility (or welfare) of
someone else. Such an insistence could lead to a situation where government actions in
favour of the poor, or those without substantive freedoms, is disabled to the extent that
better-off social actors define their utilities in opposition to those of the poor. If a
landowner in England or India defined his ‘pleasure’ precisely in terms of a gap in
incomes or status between himself and his labourers, it would be impossible to improve
the lot of the labourers without reducing the (supposed) utility of the landowner.11
It might be objected, of course, that the state should not be in the business of trans-
ferring assets or resources to the less well-off. Some libertarians will defend the
proposition that we are the authors of our own fortunes, and that efforts at ameliora-
tion on the part of the state must threaten the priority of individual liberty.12 This
argument can be extended to the international stage. It might be argued, for example,
that it would have been wrong to write down the debts of countries like Brazil and
Mexico in the 1980s because these countries had entered into contracts with banks and
governments of their own volition. The writing down of debts would amount to an
imposition on the taxpayers of other countries and would create a climate of moral
hazard that could induce further defaults (see Buiter and Srinivasan, 1987). To such
arguments, which prioritize the space of libertarian rights, Sen has responded as
follows. First, and with reference now to food, ‘even gigantic famines can result without
anyone’s libertarian rights (including property rights) being violated’ (DAF: 66). Here
the appeal is to the nature and causes of a ‘catastrophic moral horror’ (DAF: 66), an
S. Corbridge 187
appeal, as we shall see, that Sen makes many times. Secondly, more generally, ‘The
proposal of a consequence-independent theory of political priority is afflicted by con-
siderable indifference to the substantive freedoms that people end up having – or not
having. We can scarcely agree to accept simple procedural rules irrespective of conse-
quences – no matter how dreadful and totally unacceptable these consequences might
be for the lives of the people involved’ (DAF: 66).
A third reason for rejecting the absolute space of personal liberties has been made
forcefully by John Rawls. None of us are the sole authors of our fortunes or misfortunes.
We are largely the accidental products of history and geography. A girl born to landless
labourers in Bangladesh in 2002 does not have the same assets or opportunities as a boy
born to an affluent American couple living in Beverly Hills. It follows, for Rawls, that a
theory of justice as fairness would wish to ensure that all humans are endowed with a
minimum set of primary goods (including education and an income) subject only to a
prior rule that would guarantee equal personal liberties. For Sen, however, the
Rawlsian Difference Principle is good, but not good enough.13 He has repeatedly
argued that a strict equation cannot be drawn between primary goods and well-being
because the former cannot always be converted into the latter. ‘For example, a pregnant
woman may have to overcome disadvantages in living comfortably and well that a man
need not have, even when both have exactly the same income and other primary goods’
(IR: 27).
It is on the basis of this three-fold critique that Sen develops his own account of the
proper space for economic evaluation. This account, as is now well known, is concerned
mainly with substantive individual freedoms. Sen’s argument, which is presented most
forcefully in Development as freedom, is worth summarizing at length:
Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people
with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal
of substantial unfreedoms . . . is constitutive of development. However, for a fuller
understanding of the connection between development and freedom we have to go
beyond this basic recognition (crucial as it is). The intrinsic importance of human freedom,
in general, as the preeminent objective of development is strongly supplemented by the
instrumental effectiveness of freedoms of particular kinds to promote freedoms of other
kinds. The linkages between different types of freedoms are empirical and causal, rather than
constitutive and compositional. For example, there is strong evidence that economic and
political freedoms help to reinforce one another, rather than being hostile to one another
(as they are sometimes taken to be [though see Section III below] ). Similarly, social oppor-
tunities of education and health care, which may require public action, complement
individual opportunities of economic and political participation and also help to foster our
own initiatives in overcoming our respective deprivations. If the point of departure of the
approach lies in the identification of freedom as the main object of development, the reach of
the policy analysis lies in establishing the empirical linkages that make the viewpoint
of freedom coherent and cogent as the guiding perspective of the process of development’
(DAF: xii).
Thus defined, it will be clear that Sen is claiming both theoretical and empirical support
for his attempt to privilege the space of freedom, or the removal of substantial
unfreedoms. The theoretical advantages of Sen’s position are to be found in its stated
commitments to foundationalism, universalism and yet also to human difference. By
insisting that development is defined as a process of expanding real freedoms, Sen is
able to overcome the weaknesses that he detects in utilitarianism and libertarianism. If

a person is free only to the extent that she enjoys facilities for education and health care,
as well as ‘the liberty to participate in public discussion and scrutiny’ (DAF: 3), she
cannot reasonably be denied that freedom – which is the foundational space of
evaluation – by dint of appeals to the priority of aggregate social welfare or of
individual liberty. Importantly, too, this insistence on the priority of substantive
freedom allows Sen to rebuff a further and especially unpleasant aspect of utilitarian-
ism: its willingness to confuse the tolerance (or even pride) that exploited and consis-
tently deprived people might express about their daily lives with the notion that they
gain (or even maximize) utility from this suffering. As he put it in a paper drawing on
two lectures given in 1982 and 1983, ‘As people learn to adjust to the existing horrors
by the sheer necessity of uneventful survival, the horrors look less terrible in the metric
of utilities’ (RVD: 309). 14
Such foundationalism is necessarily bound up with a form of ‘minimalist universal-
ism’.15 For Sen, real freedom is defined precisely in terms of certain human and civil
rights that must be guaranteed for all. It is also defined in terms of the distribution of
what looks very similar to the ‘primary goods’ that one finds in Rawls’s theory of justice
as fairness. At the same time, however, and perhaps more so than Rawls (Sen has
claimed as much), Sen’s account of development as freedom is insistently attentive to
individual agency, the importance of choice as a freedom in itself, and to individual
human differences. Indeed, part of the elegance of Sen’s account of development as
freedom resides (or seems to reside: see Sections III–V) in his ability to reconcile the
universal and the particular. Having insisted on the importance of meeting an
expanded set of human needs, including the right not to be shamed in public, Sen
argues that individuals must be free to choose their own accounts of the good life (thus
resisting the drive to normalization that James Scott has described for the projects of
high modernism: Scott, 1998), and that freedom resides in such things as the right to
participate in market exchange itself – it is not simply a matter of free speech. Sen
further argues that the choices that free agents make will necessarily be influenced by
the differences that constitute us as individual human beings, or which shape our
personal circumstances. The conversion of personal incomes and resources into capa-
bilities, achievements, well-being or real freedoms will be affected by personal hetero-
geneities – ‘A disabled person may need some prosthesis, an older person more support
and help, a pregnant woman more nutritional intake, and so on’ (DAF: 70) – environ-
mental diversities, variations in social climate, differences in relational perspectives and
distribution within the family (after DAF: 70–71).
The notion that we are all similar and yet also different feeds through to the empirical
and practical insights that can be claimed for Sen’s account of development as freedom.
Some of these insights will be discussed further in Sections III, IV and V. In general
terms they begin with the language of ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’ that Sen uses to
fashion his accounts of famine or gender discrimination, amongst other issues.
‘Functionings’ refer to the things that a person may value doing or being, and thus
denotes a freedom to achieve a certain lifestyle (after DAF: 75). ‘Capabilities’ refer to the
sets of resources (physical, mental and social) that a person might command and that
give rise to various ‘functionings’. As Sen points out: ‘The evaluative focus [space] of
this “capability approach” can be either on the realized functionings (what a person is
actually able to do) or on the capability set of alternatives she has (her real opportuni-
S. Corbridge 189
ties). The two give different types of information – the former about the things a person
does and the latter about the things a person is substantively free to do’ (DAF: 75,
emphasis in the original).
Sen has used this approach to understand the dynamics of famines in conditions both
of ‘boom’ (Bengal in 1943–44) and of ‘bust’ (Wollo, Ethiopia in 1972–74). Using the
related language of endowments and entitlements, Sen has argued that famine deaths
result only rarely, and then in a localized sense, from a shortage of food (as is supposed
in the Food Availability Decline thesis), and rather more so from a precipitate decline in
the entitlements of various persons and social groups to parts of the regional food
supply. In the case of the Great Bengal Famine, then, the victims were to be found
mainly amongst agricultural labourers, fishermen, transport workers, paddy huskers
and others who faced a slackening demand for their labour at a time when the demand
for construction and other labour in urban Bengal was helping to push up the price of
the main staple crop, rice. These groups suffered because their entitlements to food –
their exchange entitlements – were all of a sudden inconsistent with their basic needs
or their capability to survive (PAF: chapter 6). More recently, and perhaps more in
keeping with his general thesis on development, Sen has argued that ‘no famine has
ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy’ (DAF: 16). This
claim is at one with the ‘instrumental’ defence that Sen offers for the virtues of freedom.
If freedom consists in part, but by definition, in democratic pluralism, then that same
system of governance ensures that the most basic economic freedoms are guaranteed by
its major institutions, including contending political parties and a free press. As ever,
the free flow of information is vital to this process, and to the process of economic
evaluation that is thereby entailed.
Similar arguments are at work in Sen’s accounts of gender discrimination, coercive
policies for reducing the rate of population growth, or the evils of child labour. Sen has
written movingly about the one hundred million women who are missing from the
world today as a consequence of sex-selective abortion and ‘the comparative neglect of
female health and nutrition, especially – but not exclusively – during childhood’ (DAF:
106). While the precise figure might range from 60 million to perhaps 110 million
missing women, the scale of this holocaust is horrible in the extreme.16 Sen accounts for
it in terms of the capability deprivation of women, which manifests itself not just in
unfair patterns of food sharing and health care within a household but also in terms of
the lack of voice from which many females suffer. Most women do not enjoy the same
substantive freedoms as men, a point that also holds true in a country such as the USA,
at least for Afro-American women. Sen has long used diagrams to drive home his
points about the relationships between development and freedom/unfreedom, and
Figure 1 reproduces a figure from Development as freedom (figure 4.1, p. 97) which shows
that: ‘While [middle-aged] black men have 1.8 times the mortality rate of white men,
black women have nearly three times the mortality rate of white women in this survey
[referring to Owen et al., 1990]. And adjusted for differences in family income, while the
mortality rate is 1.2 times higher for black men, it is as much as 2.2 times higher for
black women’ (DAF: 97). Such appalling statistics confirm that the reduction of
substantive freedoms is not just a problem for the developing world. Afro-Americans
continue to suffer from lower incomes and worse social services than many white
Americans and in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida it seems that many Afro-
Americans found it hard to enforce their legal right to vote.17 The distribution of a
3.5
3.0 2.9
2.5
2.3
2.2
2.0 1.8
1.6
1.5
1.2
1.0
0.5
0
All All Men Men Women Women
Actual Adjusted Actual Adjusted Actual Adjusted
Figure 1 Mortality rate ratios of blacks to white (aged 35–54 years),

actual and adjusted for family income
Source: after Sen, 2000: 97, figure 4.1 (with permission of the author),
using data from Owen et al., 1990.
primary good, in Rawls’s terms, is not always converted into a substantial freedom, in
Sen’s terms.
Sen insists that such findings bear out the importance of an approach to social
comparisons that emphasizes the space of capabilities and not of incomes. It also
restates the importance of getting inside the ‘household’. Sen follows many feminist
scholars in insisting on the asymmetrical distribution of power and resources within the
household (to the disadvantage of women almost always), and he buttresses this
insistence with his continuing commitment to the freedoms of the individual human
subject.18 This commitment is further apparent in his treatment of the child labour
issue. Sen is aware that campaigning groups have drawn attention to the income gap
that drives some parents to seek employment for their children. He insists, even so, that
child labour is very often linked to slavery or bondage, and that it robs the child of her
freedom to attend school. It is thus wrong in and of itself.
Both foundational and instrumental reasoning are apparent in the three remaining
examples that I give here of Sen’s work in its empirical and policy relevant dimensions
(all of which surface in Development as freedom). First, in the case of population control
policies, Sen argues that coercive birth control policies are unacceptable because they
deny a basic human freedom and because they generate harmful side-effects (including,
in China, increased son preference and difficulties in the near future in securing brides
for bridegrooms). But they are also unnecessary. Sen contends that, ‘Malthusian long-
run fears about food output [a principal argument for coercive fertility controls] are
baseless, or at least premature’ (DAF: 210), and he suggests that low fertility regimes
S. Corbridge 191
can be achieved by improving the position of women, as has been proven in the
southern Indian States of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Secondly, it is not the case, according
to Sen, that authoritarian governments are needed to push through rapid economic
growth or even development. Once again, this is to define development in terms of
various outcomes (however beneficial, and even where it involves a plentiful distribu-
tion of primary goods, as in pre-reform China), and with scant regard for the role that
individuals must play in the production of development as freedom. True
development, in other words, necessarily involves the active participation of informed
human beings in the processes of social change. Development is not to be confused with
something that is done to people. In addition, and in a more instrumental vein, Sen
denies that there is a significant or causal relationship between authoritarianism and
rapid economic growth. ‘Systematic empirical studies give no real support to the claim
that there is a general conflict between political freedoms and economic performance’
(DAF: 150). And thirdly, finally, Sen is opposed to arguments that suggest either that the
recent successes of some East Asian countries can be attributed to Confucianism or
some such cultural geist, or that so-called Asian values stand in opposition to so-called
Western accounts of human and civil rights. Sen, like Nussbaum, takes the Aristotelian
position: such rights are universal not particular, and as such they are constitutive of
freedom and of development.19 Moreover, while Sen accepts that ‘there is some danger
in ignoring uniqueness of cultures [the concern here, presumably, is with genocide or
ethnocide], there is also the possibility of being deceived by the presumption of
ubiquitous insularity’ (DAF: 242). In Sen’s work the difference that matters most is the
difference that defines us as individual human beings. It is this difference that informs
his approach to ‘development as freedom’ and that allows him to define development
in opposition to the more aggregated claims of some fellow academics, not to mention
those deployed by a majority of politicians and policy-makers.
III The spaces of geography
The development of Sen’s approach to ‘development as freedom’ has had significant

theoretical and practical implications. Many of these have already been noted,
including his contributions to famine prevention analysis, project evaluation and the
construction of a Human Development Index. Here, I want to suggest that Sen’s work
has been influential as well in that broad body of work that deals with ‘livelihoods’ (not
least by linking endowments to capabilities, and by defining livelihoods in material and
experiential terms), and in clarifying recent accounts of the importance of human and
social capital (see Sen, 1997b).20 Sen has also been reluctant to throw out the baby with
the bathwater in terms of the major and longstanding concerns of development studies.
Not only has he written against market idolatry (Richard Cooper’s (2000) review of
Development as freedom in Foreign Affairs was neatly titled ‘The road from serfdom’), he
has insisted that, ‘There is still much relevance in the broad policy themes which
traditional development economics has emphasized’ (RVD: 495, referring to the
importance of capital accumulation and industrialization in poorer countries, and
possibly also to the role of an ‘activist’ state in directing economic change).
Notwithstanding these insights and achievements, of course (indeed because of
them), Sen’s work has been subjected to critical scrutiny and has prompted important
debates in development studies and political economy. On some occasions this scrutiny
has been churlish, as when the Wall Street Journal denounced Sen’s insights as unre-
markable where they were not wrong, or when an Indian critic suggested he had added
little to what any ‘street urchin’ would know already.21 On other occasions it has been
misinformed, as I think was Fareed Zakaria when he complained, in an otherwise
balanced review in the New York Times, that Sen’s work was deficient because it failed
to offer ‘ a single grand idea – a “killer theorem” ‘ (Zakaria, 1999). This might be true of
Development as freedom, but it is not true of Sen’s work as a whole. After all, Sen is widely
considered to have offered a proof of ‘The impossibility of a Paretian liberal’ (Sen, 1970),
or to have made the claim that one cannot subscribe to liberal values and the Pareto
principle at the same time.22 In any case, this is to misunderstand Sen. One of his major
achievements is to insist on the superiority of what might be called partial theorems (or
incomplete orderings of the ‘good life’) in recognition of the messiness of the world
with which economics should contend. The fact that a capability perspective does not
exhaust ‘all relevant concerns for evaluative purposes’ does not cause ‘an embarrass-
ment for advocacy’ of that approach. ‘Quite the contrary . . . To insist on the mechanical
comfort of having just one homogeneous ‘good thing’ would be to deny our humanity
as reasoning creatures’ (DAF: 77).
In addition to churlish or misguided criticisms, however, there have been others that
have raised profound questions about the significance of Sen’s work. This is not the
place to review these criticisms or the debates they might have sparked (although I will
take up some of them along the way), but I would note, in particular, that Peter Nolan
(1993) has taken exception to Sen’s analysis of famines, that Mozaffar Qizilbash (1997)
and Des Gasper (1997) have produced important critiques of Sen’s account of capabili-
ties, that Richard Cooper (2000) has questioned whether Sen has successfully balanced
his defence of freedoms against the claims of security and stability, and that John Rawls
has contended that his account of the distribution of primary goods is better equipped
to deal with the particular claims of women, the elderly or the disabled than Sen is
willing to admit (see Rawls, 1996: 183–86). To these criticisms, or in partial development
of them, I now want to add some further observations that consider how Sen’s
arguments are prosecuted in terms of the spaces of geography, culture and politics.
Geography features strongly in Sen’s work. Unlike some of his colleagues in the
dismal science, Sen has a strong sense of place, an attitude encouraged, no doubt, by his
experiences growing up in Bengal and by the peripatetic lifestyle he has lived since first
leaving India.23 One is struck, even so, by the regularity with which certain places crop
up in Sen’s narratives, or in his quasi-anecdotal attempts to ground his more abstract
claims. Latin American and, to a lesser extent, African countries feature less often in
Sen’s work than do countries in South and East Asia. And within South and East Asia,
Sen has paid special attention to India and China, as well as to Japan, Sri Lanka and
some of the newly industrialized countries. In India, furthermore, it is Kerala that
features most often (and most positively), although there are numerous references to
Tamil Nadu and Punjab, and to West Bengal, where Sen carried out fieldwork on child
nutrition issues with Sunil Sengupta.24
None of this should surprise us, but it does suggest that we might get a better sense
of the construction of Sen’s arguments by paying some attention to his accounts of place
and geographic space. Consider, first, the argument that authoritarianism is not a pre-
condition for, or even linked in any significant fashion to, the prosecution of economic
S. Corbridge 193
development. In one sense this is true by definition. If development is about participa-

tion and the expansion of individual freedoms, authoritarian rule cannot be held to
advance it, at least in the short run. But Sen wants to claim rather more than this.
Freedom is considered not only as the principal end of development but also as its
mainspring (DAF: xii). Sen contends that: ‘We cannot really take the high economic
growth of China or South Korea as a definitive proof that authoritarianism does better
in promoting economic growth – any more than we can draw the opposite conclusion
on the basis of the fact that the fastest-growing African country (and one of the fastest
growing in the world), viz., Botswana, has been an oasis of democracy on that troubled
continent. Much depends on the precise circumstances’ (DAF: 149–50).
This seems reasonable enough. There is no significant relationship at the global scale
between political regime types and patterns of economic performance.25 But what of
precise circumstances? It might be argued that Botswana is something of a special case,
given its reliance on diamond exports. More seriously, is it reasonable for Sen to dismiss
evidence in regard to China or South Korea (or even Japan) that fits uneasily with one
part (the instrumental part) of his wider thesis? After all, Sen is not minded to accept
simple neoliberal arguments about the successes of the East Asian Tigers: that they
developed by getting relative prices right and by producing goods competitively for the
world market. He accepts that an activist state in South Korea took steps to liberalize
the economy only after first protecting it, and that the same state prosecuted an effective
programme of ‘land to the tiller’ land reforms in the 1950s. He further accepts that the
government in South Korea was able to invest heavily in education and infrastructure
in the 1950s and 1960s, before the advent of concerted pro-democracy movements in the
country.26 In the case of Japan, furthermore, Sen has several times noted that the origins
of that country’s industrial development were laid by the Meiji state in the late
nineteenth century, again long before the development of a functioning democracy in
that country (a point made some years ago by Barrington Moore: Moore, 1966).27 As for
China, it is self-evident that the country has developed, in several key respects, under
an authoritarian regime.
Why does this matter? It matters because there is a tendency in Sen’s work to read
the evidence on these countries in an inconsistent and sometimes confusing manner,
and because the devil is indeed in the detail. Let me take these points in reverse. The
argument that there is no general – global – relationship between political regime type
and economic performance is true but not of great import. There are many different
types of democracy and many different types of authoritarian regime.28 It is not helpful
to make an argument about politics and economics in these terms given the vast
differences between, say, Mobutu’s Zaire and Mao’s or Deng’s China, or between
Holland and the USA. What really matters is the quality of governance, a point that the
World Bank now accepts even if it, too, is determined to define good governance in
terms of ‘democratization’ or even ‘participation’.29 A reasonable question to ask, then,
working backwards in time and towards the particular, is this: ‘How many countries
have industrialized successfully while functioning as a representative or participatory
democracy?’. Asking such a question does not commit me to an endorsement of even
one authoritarian regime in broader or more foundational terms. I might agree with Sen
that freedom is an overriding goal. But Sen wants to claim more than this, and the
answer to the question – which is surely ‘close to none as yet, although matters are
changing’ – is uncomfortable for his broader thesis.30 It is significant, and perhaps of
concern, that the ex-colonial countries that have made most progress in developing
their economies, and in expanding many positive freedoms, have been those where
‘more or less effective authoritarian regimes’ have curtailed some negative freedoms in
order to deal purposefully with ‘the agrarian question’ – the question of transferring
resources from agriculture to industry without ruining the former sector – and with
questions of capital mobilization and employment. The fact that most authoritarian
regimes have performed very badly in terms of any definition of development does not
affect this argument.
It might be objected, of course, that the economic and social achievements of some
East Asian countries are not causally or necessarily related to the fact of authoritarian
governance, and this is an argument that Sen deploys in Development as freedom. He
writes that: ‘There is nothing whatsoever to indicate that any of these policies
[‘openness to competition, the use of international markets, a high level of literacy and
school education, successful land reforms and public provision of incentives for
investing, exporting and industrialization’] is inconsistent with greater democracy and
actually had to be sustained by the elements of authoritarianism that happened to be
present in South Korea or Singapore or China’ (DAF: 150). But this is an objection that
we should treat with caution. Not only does Sen’s list of policies miss out some
initiatives where authoritarian regimes might have a comparative advantage (for
example, in terms of discounting the immediate demands of social elites),31 but there is
evidence to suggest that successful land reforms have not generally been carried out in
‘democracies’, where they have usually been blocked by agrarian elites.32 Further, there
is a considerable literature that suggests that in most democracies (where power is not
distributed evenly: see Section V below) there are trade-offs to be made between some
freedoms and the pace of economic development. Not a small part of this literature has
taken India as one of its case studies. (One thinks, not least, of Pranab Bardhan’s (1984,
1988) work on the reasons for India’s slow economic growth in the 1970s. In addition,
while the postreform Indian economy prospered to an extent in the 1990s, it is at least
possible that this was because many of the reforms were pushed through – often behind
the scenes, as Rob Jenkins (1999) has shown – with little regard for public debate). The
broader point, in any case, is this: there might be reason for thinking that Sen’s
arguments skirt too easily over the vexed question of trade-offs between different
freedoms. In his most recent work there is a tendency to assume that the maximization
of one set of freedoms is always positively associated with the development of other
freedoms. This is unlikely and fails to register what John Toye (1987) has called the
inherent ‘dilemmas of development’, either in terms of trade-offs between concurrent
goals, or between one or more goals over time.
Consider, next, the comparison of India and China that Sen makes so frequently, and
for good reason. Sen accepts – perhaps to a surprising degree in the eyes of some
observers33 – that the Chinese government has made considerable headway since 1949
in expanding the ‘positive’ freedoms of the Chinese people. In his article on ‘Food and
freedom’ (1989) Sen demonstrated that while average life expectancies for Chinese and
Indian citizens were roughly the same in 1952, by 1965 a person born in China could
expect to live about 12 years longer than a person born in India in the same year. Given
that some 12 million Indians were born in 1965 this suggests that there was an annual
‘loss of equivalent life expectancy’ (my term) for this one year of perhaps 140 million
person years. Over the next ten years, as Figure 2 clearly shows, the relative absence of
S. Corbridge 195
this positive freedom (from death) in India, compared with China, would have
amounted to almost 1.5 billion person years. Sen also accepts that the premium that
accrued to China (and still does accrue to China, albeit at a much reduced level) was
brought about by the investments that the communist governments made in primary
health care systems, social welfare (including the iron rice bowl system), and the redis-
tribution of income and land. In Development and Freedom, furthermore, Sen agrees
that China has outperformed India in raising literacy and education levels (DAF: 42),
and in its willingness, more recently, to ‘make use of the market economy’ to secure
high and sustained levels of economic growth (DAF: 42).
Notwithstanding these achievements, Sen is reluctant to endorse what might be
called a ‘Chinese model’ of economic development. He has argued that an expansion of
positive freedoms in China has been bought at a heavy price. Many democratic liberties
have been lost, along with that measure of systemic flexibility that might have protected
the country against the horrors of the famines that struck in 1958–61, when 30 million
people died, and that might yet protect the country against endogenous or external
shocks (whether in terms of political succession or a financial crisis). In addition, Sen
has argued that India has not suffered a famine since 1947, and he attributes this ‘fact’
to the existence of a free press and active opposition parties. No government in India
can afford to disregard evidence of famine deaths in the way that the Chinese
government ignored its own people 40 years ago. Putting these observations together,
70
China
60
Life expectancy (years)
50 India
40
30
Chinese famines
1958-1961
20
1950 1960 1970 1980
Calendar year
Figure 2 Life expectancies in China and India, 1950–1980
Source: after Sen, 1989: figure 1 (with permission of the author).
Sen concludes that: ‘There are very many different interconnections between distinct
instrumental freedoms’ (DAF: 43).
And so, of course, there are. But while this conclusion is eminently reasonable, it is
also curious from the vantage point of some of Sen’s wider arguments. If Sen wants to
argue that neither India nor China is ‘developed’ because they lack substantial
freedoms, this is true if somewhat obvious. By the same token, if Sen wishes to make a
priority of individual liberty (as does John Rawls), it might be reasonable to conclude
that India is more free – or even ‘developed’ – than China (although this begs many
questions about the nature of democratic freedoms in India).34 But if Sen is arguing
what he appears to be arguing – that there are many different interconnections between
different instrumental freedoms – it is hard to see how this argument is fully consistent
with his critique of authoritarian governments, at least in regard to the China–India
comparison. Indeed, one might go further. One might argue that Sen’s arguments about
the geography of famine miss (or simplify) two further points: that famine has stalked
India since independence (in Bihar in 1967, in Kalahandi, Orissa more recently),35 and
that the Chinese famine of 1958–61, terrible though it was, might not have been a
necessary product of authoritarian government (as opposed to bad authoritarian
government).
This argument should not be misunderstood. I am not saying that authoritarianism
is to be preferred to democracy, or that there is no intrinsic or necessary relationship
between authoritarian rule and a disposition to disregard various civil and even human
rights. Steven Lukes has discussed the moral failings of social doctrines, such as
Marxism, which too easily make reference to the presumed merits of a political end-
state to justify very rough and ready measures to get there (Lukes, 1985). Amartya Sen
made the same point in an interview with Akash Kapur when he objected to ‘some
dreadful slogans like, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet” ‘ (Kapur,
1999a: 3), and Arthur Koestler made it as well as anyone in Darkness at Noon. Nor am I
denying the possibility of a third way between the Indian and Chinese patterns of
development. (In ‘Food and freedom’ (1989) Sen wrote in support of the Sri Lankan
experience, at least prior to the civil war there). But I do want to suggest that the
expansion of positive freedoms in China poses more of a problem for Sen’s analysis
than he seems willing to acknowledge. It is difficult to see why, if we are to assume that
famine has largely been avoided in India since 1947 because of that country’s democratic
political traditions, we would then seek to deny a similar level of causality between
authoritarian rule and the promotion of substantial freedoms in China. There are good
reasons for thinking that ‘good authoritarian regimes’ can solve various collective
action problems, or issues relating to deferred gratification, in a more efficient manner
than some democracies (at least in poorer countries), even if we wish it were not so, or
even if we disapprove of all forms of nondemocratic politics. In addition, while Sen is
prepared to accept that there are many types of instrumental freedom, he seems less
willing to recognize that there are many different types of democratic and authoritari-
an rule. Sen is thus driven to celebrate the achievements of nondemocratic China
(presumably as contingent events), even as he builds an argument that suggests that the
expansion of one set of substantive freedoms is linked with the expansion of all other
sets of substantive freedoms. The experiences of both China and India suggest that
matters are otherwise. From the perspective of the poor there are good reasons for
thinking that China has performed better than India, except in the area of civil liberties
S. Corbridge 197
(and even then not in an unqualified fashion), and that this has not a little to do with
the nature of political rule in China.36
But then, of course, there is Kerala, the one State in India where a significant
expansion of positive and negative freedoms has gone hand in hand. Kerala features
strongly in Sen’s account of geographical space. He points out that people born in
Kerala have a better chance of reaching an advanced age than African-Americans in the
USA (DAF: 21), that levels of literacy are very high, and that the position of women is
generally good and has resulted in lower fertility levels (as was reported earlier). Sen
attributes these successes to a process of ‘support-led’ economic development where
the state invests strongly in welfare and infrastructural schemes. That this has
happened in part within a democratic system surely lends support to his wider
argument, and Kerala is indeed an interesting case. But here, too, we need to tread
carefully. This is not simply because Kerala is facing difficulties in moving from
support-led to ‘growth-mediated’ patterns of economic development, a point that Sen
concedes (DAF: 46),37 but also because the special conditions that have made for success
in Kerala are not easily replicated (a point that is also conceded; DAF: 48) and are not
always proof that ‘freedom leads to development and thus to more freedom’. While the
birth rate in Kerala has fallen rapidly since Independence (from 44 per 1000 in the 1950s
to 18 by 1991; DAF: 222), literacy rates were high even before Kerala had been created
from the erstwhile native States of Travancore and Cochin. Allowing for lag effects,
there is some evidence to suggest that the bases of the Kerala success-story were laid in
a more authoritarian era than the present, even accepting that matters have been
improved since 1947 by the actions of (and competition between) the Communist Party
of India and a left-leaning Congress Party.38
Once again, the point is a simple one. It is not, of course, that Kerala is undeserving
of celebration, or that Amartya Sen believes that all is well in this south Indian State. It
is, rather, that the geographies of Amartya Sen are not all that they might seem to be.
While land reforms and social justice have gone hand in hand in Kerala or Taiwan, or
in South Korea, and whilst the improved education of females in these and other places
has reduced fertility rates (for example), it is probably unwise to claim, as Sen now
seems inclined to do, that such improvements have only a contingent relationship with
any form of authoritarian government. The instrumental and foundational arguments
for and about ‘development as freedom’ need to be carefully distinguished.
IV The spaces of culture
Sen has dealt with the spaces of culture: (a) to explore and more recently to reject the
idea that differential patterns of economic performance might be culturally determined;
(b) to argue strongly for a politics of toleration that is rooted in respect for the
individual, rather than for the mores of particular social groups; and (c) to consider
whether development must clash with certain claims to difference that are grounded in
traditions of autonomy or self-preservation. As ever, there is an enormous amount to
value in Sen’s interventions (and there is considerable overlap in his treatment of (b)
and (c) ), even if there are areas in need of further scrutiny. It is also apparent that the
cultured nature of Sen’s own writing – in a recent review essay Anthony Atkinson drew
attention to Sen’s fondness for literary references (Atkinson, 1999: 188, no. 16) – coexists
with a deep-rooted anxiety about religiously based social identities. This anxiety dates
back to Sen’s experiences during the Partition of India and colours his approach to (b)
and (c).
1 Asian values?
There was a time when Sen seemed quite taken by the ‘Asian values’ literature. In his
1982 Fred Hirsch Memorial Lecture, he argued not only that ‘the scope for nonprofit
behaviour . . . varies greatly between countries’, but that: ‘The extent of loyalty,
cooperation, sense of duty, and public spirit that is observed in Japanese factories is
evidently in sharp contrast with what can be found in, say, Britain. There is little doubt
that the Japanese attitude to private gain and public duty differs greatly from that in
other rich, industrial countries . . . The differences in social psychology play a major
part in economic performance but also in such other communal matters as the lower
crime rate, much less frequent litigation (indeed, far fewer lawyers per unit of
population), and so on’ (RVD: 104). Today, Sen is archly critical of this same thesis,
having noted, perhaps, the remarkable changes in British ‘workplace cultures’ that
were brought about by UK employers and the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the
1980s.
The strength of Sen’s new found scepticism is regularly on display in Development as
freedom, as it must be if the author wants to head off a form of reasoning that links
development backwards to authoritarianism and stoic cultural values. Sen spends con-
siderable time challenging the view that ‘Asian values’, and more particularly those of
Confucianism, have had a definite and positive effect upon economic development. He
points out that ‘Asia’ is an enormous and highly differentiated geographical space,
accounting for 60% of the world’s population, and that patterns of development in the
region have differed hugely. He further maintains that there are significant differences
in the religious and social practices of East Asians – those singled out by the former
Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, as being especially well suited to ‘guided’
development, not least because of their distance from ‘Western’ values: see DAF: 232 –
with many Japanese following both Shintoist and Buddhist religious practices at the
same time. More generally, he notes that:
Cultures and traditions overlap over regions such as East Asia and even within countries such
as Japan or China or Korea, and attempts at generalization about ‘Asian values’ (with forceful
– often brutal – implications for masses of people in this region with diverse faiths, convictions
and commitments) cannot but be extremely crude. Even the 2.8 million people of Singapore
have vast variations of cultural and historical traditions. Indeed, Singapore has an admirable
record in fostering intercommunity amity and friendly coexistence (DAF: 232).
These are helpful points, and it is not accidental that Sen proceeds to argue that
Confucianism does not only teach allegiance to the state, it also teaches loyalty to the
(male dominated) family. Perhaps more importantly, Sen believes that essentialized
accounts of ‘Asian values’, or of ‘Islamic intolerance’, are at odds with the plasticity of
social life in the developing world and reinforce a longstanding Orientalism that has
sought sharply to distinguish the West from the rest. In the past of course, and often
times still today, this distinction aimed to privilege the West as a source of reason and
progress. Against this backdrop, a celebration of ‘Asian values’ is not always a step in
S. Corbridge 199
the right direction. The danger remains that some of the values that we associate with
post-Enlightenment western Europe or North America are taken to be ‘Western’ in a
deeper and more primordial sense, with the rest of the world being considered an
unlikely hearth for such values as respect for individual liberty or autonomy. Not only
does this neglect the historical association between Buddhism, say, and accounts of
volition and free choice (DAF: 234), it also implies that a yearning for freedom or a
facility in science are not likely to be found among contemporary South or East Asians.
This last proposition is obviously unsound, and Sen does great service to his readers
by critiquing the work of cultural determinists. ‘Cultures’ should not be thought of as
sets of clearly defined and nonoverlapping social practices, as the ‘Lee thesis’ or the
work of Samuel Huntington (1993) seem to imply, nor are they set in aspic. But what of
more nuanced accounts of ‘culture’ and ‘development’? Is it possible that Sen has
neglected some more interesting work on this relationship, including the work of some
anthropologists of the state? In regard to ‘development’ in India, for example, it has
been suggested that a gap in understanding can open up between politicians,
bureaucrats and economic managers working in New Delhi and the men and women
who represent the state in India’s Districts, Blocks and villages. Sudipta Kaviraj (1991)
believes that these two groups inhabit different cultural worlds: the world of the
English-speaking elites and that of the local or ‘vernacular’. In his view, and in the view
of Partha Chatterjee (1997), planning failed in India because the developmental
ambitions of the country’s ruling elites were not shared by – or were even intelligible to
– the country’s social majorities.
These observations can be linked to a body of work that suggests that Indian society
is cellular (that is family, kin and caste-based), so that ‘the state [including the develop-
mental state] is distanced from and inessential to the moral core of [Indian] society’
(Fuller and Harriss, 2001: A-6). More broadly still, it can be linked to the thesis,
advanced recently by Jean-Philippe Platteau (1994), but which reaches back to Max
Weber, that poor countries suffer from an absence of that sense of ‘generalized morality’
that would encourage trust in contracts over space and time, and which might be
necessary for the production of a stable and expanded system of market exchange.
Whereas Sen concentrates his critical faculties on Asian values and success stories (and
their noncorrespondence), Platteau (and some Dumontians in India)39 are more prone
to argue that a sense of loyalty to strangers is compatible only with the worldviews
which have emerged around the politics of classical Republicanism in Europe (itself
supported by Protestantism), or in Japan, where a version of Chinese Confucianism was
linked to a cult of the Emperor to create a sense of loyalty to the post-Tokugawa state.
In other parts of the world a sense of personhood, or of an autonomous individual, is
less often developed, and is less often available to help convert capabilities into
substantive freedoms.
I am not sure how Sen would deal with these points, some of which deserve his
further attention. My guess is that he would agree with Mick Moore that Platteau
‘underestimates the importance of inter-business markets’ in nonwestern societies, and
fails to consider how states might provide ‘institutional reputation mechanisms’ to
encourage people to learn the ways of the market (Moore, 1994: 818). He might also
have reservations about a thesis that so starkly opposes the cultures of the ‘upper’ and
‘lower’ orders in India. But there is a case to be considered here, and it is possible that
a culturalist critique of Sen’s work will emerge strongly in the years ahead. If it does, it
should recognize that Sen is not opposed to cultural arguments on a smaller scale. If Sen
is sceptical of ‘continental’ or quasi-primordial accounts about culture in relation to
development, he would agree that ‘culture’ can matter within specified bundles of time
and space. ‘Shared norms can influence social features such as gender equity, the nature
of child care, family size and fertility patterns, the treatment of the environment and
many other arrangements and outcomes’ (DAF: 9). The point is that, for Sen, these
norms can be changed, if needs be, and can be changed in swift order where they are
supported by less than permanent incentive systems.
2 The politics of toleration

The presumed malleability of cultural practices also informs Sen’s account of the
politics of toleration. In this case, however, his work is further informed by a normative
bias to ‘individual freedom as a social commitment’ (DAF: chapter 12). This bias makes
him sceptical of arguments that invoke a ‘group difference principle’, or that call into
question the virtues of individual liberty or apparently ‘human’ values. As is well
known, Sen’s world is not populated by rational fools or by thinly rational economic
agents.40 His social actors bear the marks of gender, race, ethnicity, class or religion,
even as they share certain common goals and needs. But Sen’s actors also intermingle.
Sen insists not only that all human beings share certain common needs (and thus
values), but that human beings in the modern world are only rarely the inhabitants of
a closed social world – the bearers (or as he would see it the prisoners) of a single and
possibly restrictive social identity.
Sen’s anxiety about ‘the terrible burden of narrowly defined identities’ (DAF: 8)
reaches back to his experiences of the communal riots that preceded the partitioning of
British India. Both in Development as freedom and in his Nobel autobiography, Sen
recounts the story of Kader Mia, a Muslim daily labourer who came screaming into the
Sen family compound in Dhaka after being knifed by Hindu thugs. Kader Mia died
later in hospital, and Sen tells his story in part to remind us that it was Kader Mia’s
economic unfreedom that led to his loss of life. His family was poor and he had to look
for work in a hostile neighbourhood. But Sen has also written more generally about the
politics of communalism in South Asia, and about the importance of secularism as a
coherent ideology for safeguarding the interests of contending religious groups.
Writing in the wake of the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP: a Hindu
nationalist party that has been critical of what it calls ‘pseudo-secularism’, or attempts
to ‘appease’ the Muslim minority in India), Sen declared that ‘the abandonment of
secularism [which in India means symmetric treatment of different religious
communities] . . . would make things far more wintry than they currently are’ (Sen,
1996: 42–43). These remarks were written shortly after the Babri Masjid (mosque) in
Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, was torn down on the 6 and 7 December 1992 by kar sevaks
(volunteers) of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council, a sister organi-
zation of the BJP).
In my view, Sen is right to make a strong defence of secularism in India.41 It is
important, even so, that we look at some alternative readings of this issue and consider
how they might bear on Sen’s stance on the cultural politics of difference and toleration.
We can usefully begin with the work of Partha Chatterjee, T.N. Madan and Ashis
S. Corbridge 201
Nandy.42 Notwithstanding certain differences in their positions, they have each made
significant contributions to the debate on secularism in India. Madan and Nandy have
described secularism in India as an alien ideology that is at odds with the everyday
cultural understandings of India’s social majorities. Nandy, indeed, has suggested that
an ideology of secularism is little more than an attempt by the state to deny the
importance of true religious values in India (what he calls religions of faith, not of
ideology). In its zealous attempts to normalize the Other it is ‘ethnophobic and
frequently ethnocidal’ (Nandy, 1998: 331), and it calls forth a militant Hinduism that
mirrors its intolerance. Partha Chatterjee doesn’t go this far, but he insists that an
effective defence of ‘minority cultural rights’ must take its cue from a politics of
difference that empowers minorities to say ‘we will not give reasons for not being like
you’, and which asks each ‘religious group [to] publicly seek and obtain from its
members consent for its practices insofar as those practices have regulative power over
the members’ (Chatterjee, 1994: 1775). He thus opposes a politics of accommodation
from within to a coercive politics of state-directed normalization (the secular ideal) from
without and, in this respect, as in the hope that true communities of believers will
remove religion as ideology from the realm of democratic politics, his argument bears
comparison with those of Nandy and Madan (this paragraph after Corbridge and
Harriss, 2000: 196)
How does Sen deal with these arguments? In what terms does he insist on the
importance of secularism? The matter is not dealt with in Development as freedom,
but we know that Sen objects to anti-secularism (which is what Nandy professes)
because it assumes that religions of faith will be open, tolerant and even plural, and
because it defines the state as an originary source of violence. The evidence of the last 60
or more years suggests that matters are more complicated. Chatterjee’s defence of the
‘right not to give a reason for being different’ might empower certain social groups
against the state, but it has little to say to those ‘groups within a group’ who extend a
politics of toleration in one direction and yet fail to see it reciprocated (for example, low
caste Hindus who might admit high caste Hindus to ‘their’ temples or wells only to find
that high caste Hindus are invoking a right to be different to protect ‘their’ own
privileges). For all its undoubted strengths, a radicalized politics of difference – what
we might call an essentialized politics of difference – is only likely to succeed in
conditions where there is a low level of interaction between social groups with more
than one set of ultimate ideals. It is more usually incumbent on societies to refer
conflicts between contending groups to a set of rules or procedures that are widely
agreed or that require concessions from all parties (after Corbridge and Harriss, 2000:
199).
I happen to agree with this argument, but it is important to note that any such
defence of secularism – or some other ‘transcultural principle’ – is made on the basis of
a presumed need to defend certain negative freedoms. Secularism is defended, in other
words, on the ground that it works to ensure amity or an absence of overt violence
between contending social groups; it is not being defended as a means to expand the
freely chosen lifestyles of any one cultural group. This is fair enough – and Sen agrees
that we have to make choices between different types of freedom – but it does suggest
that there is more work to be done before Sen’s accounts of ‘development as freedom’
will convince a communitarian. It certainly raises questions about the means by which
Sen presumes to handle the issue of contending ultimate values where the threat of
violence is not present. How, then, are individual freedoms to be weighed against what
might be the competing demands of group difference and social stability?
3 Contending ultimate values

We can consider this question further with reference to two examples. First, suppose
that a particular community decides that it wants to have nothing to do with
‘development’ as that has traditionally been conceived. Suppose, further, that this
community is deeply patriarchal and practices forms of gender discrimination as they
are commonly understood. Suppose, too, that the women of this community have been
informed by others that they are the subjects of gender discrimination, that they have
discussed the matter and that they have chosen not to object to these practices, perhaps
because they do not recognize the descriptions offered by outsiders. (Or suppose that a
minority of the women do object to some or all of these practices but are out-voted by
a majority of the women in the community.) What problems, if any, does this scenario
present for Sen’s account of development as freedom? Secondly, suppose that a
community discovers that a defence of its ‘narrowly defined identity’ provides it with
a competitive edge, and a greater means of acquiring capabilities and functionings. The
identity here might be that of a caste or jati (roughly, a subcaste or extended lineage).
Suppose, for example, that a community of Yadavs in Bihar or of Chamars in Uttar
Pradesh, finds it rational to downplay intragroup differences in order to acquire
benefits from a state that follows a policy of ‘compensatory discrimination’, and which
reserves jobs, educational places and seats in political institutions for members of
designated communities. How would Sen deal with (or judge: and on what basis?) the
bases and consequences of group-based social mobilizations of this type?
These are serious questions, but it is not clear that they present insurmountable diffi-
culties for Sen’s thesis. A close reading of Sen on culture, freedom and conflicting values
reveals the extraordinary breadth of his major arguments and of their appeals to
something that can be underestimated in social science: common sense. Take the
question of gender discrimination and contending values. If a community wants to opt
out of ‘conventional development’ this is not inconsistent with Sen’s insistence on the
right of different groups to choose the kinds of lives they have reason to value. His work
is radically tolerant in this respect. Sen might even agree to the continuation of what
some Westerners would define as patriarchal practices in that community, if all of the
‘victims’ of those practices have understood that some other people are defining them
as victims of oppression, and if they have had chance to discuss the matter openly and
at length. More likely, though, he would insist that this is an example of theoretical
reasoning being used to invent a situation that has no empirical referent (in which case
it becomes a nonissue).43 The greater difficulty, for Sen, might come in relation to a
situation where a larger community of women imposes rules (perhaps on female
genital mutilation) on a smaller and less powerful group of (younger) women. At this
point we might be asked to choose between the presumed rights of an individual young
woman and the rights or cultural traditions of her social group. Sen would surely opt
for a defence of an individual’s human rights in such a situation, as would I. But this
defence is, finally, a statement of personal values.44 (The broader defence is that it is
impossible to maximize all freedoms at the same time or even, perhaps, over time.
S. Corbridge 203
Choices have to be made, and in the absence of a full and consistent ordering of the
virtues or a specific formula to settle this question (see DAF: 286), Sen’s preference is for
the universal acquisition of certain basic capabilities.) Finally, regarding the Chamars or
the Yadavs, there is an issue here for Sen, but it is a matter more of politics than of
culture (see Section VI). The point, simply, and this returns us to so-called Asian values,
is that a heightened sense of caste or ethnic identities is here being encouraged by state
policy. If this is a matter of concern it is open to the state to change its policies.
V The spaces of politics
This brings me to the spaces of politics, and to what might called an absence of sorts –
a space in the form of a gap – in Sen’s work. This is not to suggest that Sen is insensitive
to the claims of politics or the need to make practical interventions to secure the goals
that he or others might set for themselves. Much of Sen’s work in the fields of social
choice theory and the analysis of inequality is meant to point up the importance of
public policy. This is one reason why he is so firmly opposed to utilitarianism and to
what he suggests is a misreading of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Sen wants to make
a space for politics. But the nature of that politics is only weakly specified, and Paul
Seabright complains that Sen’s desire to see politicians held accountable for their
actions is diminished to the extent that he fails to specify particular policies or
determinate policy outcomes. ‘Development as freedom is curiously silent about the
difficulty of devising mandates that work’ (Seabright, 2001: 43). This silence can be
linked to Sen’s lack of attention to the conditions that allow some governments
(including some authoritarian governments) to perform better than others. In his recent
work there is a tendency to privilege participation over command to an extent that
raises questions about the capabilities of governments (as opposed to those of
individual agents). In addition, Sen’s liberalism leaves him poorly equipped to deal
with questions of entrenched power and the politics of conflict or social mobilization.
The occasional reference to the importance of ‘public activism’ in Travancore and
Cochin (IE: 128), or to the achievements of the Self-Employed Women’s Association
(SEWA) in north India (DAF: 116), cannot disguise a reluctance to deal with politics
more broadly, or to do so in a way that assigns primacy to something other than ideas.
The idealism that informs Sen’s politics is part of a long tradition dating back to
Keynes and Adam Smith.45 It is well known that Keynes (1936) declared that ‘it is ideas,
not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or ill’, but it is perhaps less well
known that Smith attributed the power of elites to ‘a better knowledge of their own
interest’ (DAF: 122). In any case, Sen takes a similar line. ‘There is no reason why vested
interests must win if open arguments are permitted and promoted . . . Here too . . . the
remedy has to lie in more freedom – including that of public discussion and participa-
tory political decisions’ (DAF: 123). To this perspective Sen allies an alertness to the
possibility of market failure, and an insistence that it is possible rationally to derive a
social choice from individual preferences.
This last observation would seem to put him at odds with Arrow’s famous ‘impossi-
bility theorem’, but Sen insists this is not the case. Sen accepts that: ‘Arrow’s theorem
shows . . . that not just the majority rule, but all mechanisms of decision making that
rely on the same informational base (to wit, only individual orderings of the relevant
alternatives) would lead to some inconsistency or infelicity, unless we go for the

dictatorial solution of making one person’s preference ranking rule the roost’ (DAF:
251). This could be a depressing conclusion for it seems to rule out a space for politics.
But Sen is unwilling to draw this conclusion, and he suggests that Arrow’s theorem
holds true only on the basis of a narrow reading of the information that is needed or
that could be available to provide ‘coherent and consistent criteria for social and
economic assessment’ (DAF: 253). Once social facts such as poverty, illness or even
happiness are factored in to the equation, alongside individual preference rankings, a
space for progressive politics is opened up. In effect, individual needs take their place
alongside individual preferences, and Sen reaches a conclusion that certainly would not
offend John Rawls and possibly not even Karl Marx.
There is more to Sen on Arrow (and Debreu) than I have suggested here, but this is
not the place to develop these points.46 The more general issues that I wish to underline
concern the defensiveness and expansiveness of Sen’s conception of politics. When Sen
writes of politics he writes, first, against the views of those whom he takes to be closing
off a space for a progressive or pro-poor politics. This group of writers includes not just
Kenneth Arrow or the utilitarians, but also those who dismiss the case for directed
social change on the ground that it is utopian (because it is at odds with the selfishness
of human nature), or that it will produce unintended consequences that are more
damaging than those that are meant to be secured (as Menger and Hayek have argued).
But having once engaged with these views Sen wants to insist that a sense of social
justice can and does move people, and that many of the worst ‘unintended conse-
quences’ that people have faced (such as many Chinese faced after the grotesquely
misnamed Great Leap Forward) could have been anticipated and ameliorated, if not
quite avoided (see the more general discussion in DAF: 258–60). But such anticipation,
of course, presupposes that an activist state is balanced by a plural civil society and by
a vocal and informed public. ‘Good politics’ on this account presupposes and gives rise
to an expansion of democratic freedoms.
These are important points, but there is an element of circularity here that points up
some limitations in Sen’s account of the spaces of politics. In the most general sense, of
course, there is the matter – yet again – of ‘authoritarianism’ and its relationship to
development. Sen’s appeal to the possibility of a wiser Chinese leadership begs the
question of what might have happened in China post-1949 without the Communist
Party being in command, and of how precisely the conditions for democratic politics
could have been fostered in China after the Japanese invasion and the civil war. (It also
begs questions about the relationship of the Great Leap Forward to the Sino–Soviet split
in 1958, but that is another matter.) The fact is that many positive freedoms were
expanded in China by an authoritarian government, and quite rapidly so (as Sen
several times points out). The onus must be on critics of ‘effective authoritarian rule’ to
show that similar improvements could have been produced by a democratically elected
government, and that political conditions were in place to produce such a regime. This
is a task that Sen refuses to take on, preferring to take China to task for the terrible
famines of 1958–61 and for its coercive population control policies. But this is unsatis-
factory. Sen’s accounts of the lessons of Chinese development too often switch between
‘political freedoms’ (where it is condemned) and ‘socio-economic freedoms’ (where it is
often praised), while every effort is made to keep the two categories separate (for fear
of entertaining a more general argument about ‘authoritarianism’). It is also stretching
S. Corbridge 205
logic to argue that all authoritarian regimes must lack the capacity to anticipate their
own actions. This will be true in the vast majority of cases, but it is important not to
conflate logical and empirical arguments.
A second area of concern has to do with what Sen is arguing for, and how this case is
made. Sen is not concerned with a person’s freedom to drive a car fast or to wear jeans
to work. These might be important freedoms for some people, and a source of
unfreedom or nuisance for some others, but Sen is more concerned with five ‘instru-
mental freedoms’ that allow us to live a life free of ‘starvation, undernourishment,
escapable morbidity and premature mortality, as well as the freedoms that are
associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and
uncensored speech and so on’ (DAF: 36). He lists these freedoms as political freedoms
(including the right to vote and to scrutinize the work of officials), economic facilities
(including wealth and its distribution), social opportunities (notably education and
health care), transparency guarantees (trust and openness) and protective security
(DAF: 38–40), and it is worth noting that China has done quite well in terms of the
second, fourth and fifth of these categories – hence its importance to Sen’s analysis. (It
is also worth noting that there is some overlap between instrumental and intrinsic
freedoms in this account: as between education and illiteracy.) But how are these
freedoms achieved or acquired? On this question Sen is indeed ‘curiously silent’. To be
sure, he demonstrates that some countries or regions have acquired a freedom from
escapable morbidity and illiteracy that cannot be predicted by their economic
performance. China and Kerala again come to mind. But if these countries or regions
are exceptional, and if the benefits have not come from authoritarian rule, what lessons
do they hold for other countries and regions? What particular policies does Sen have in
mind to get us from (a) to (b)?
Again, it is not clear that an answer is forthcoming. Not only does Sen pride himself
on not offering advice to governments (although Seabright notes that Development as
freedom emerged from lectures to the World Bank), his account of the spaces of politics
is limited to the defensive/expansive modes that I referred to above. And the expansive
mode consists mainly of saying that rational social choices are possible, that there is
scope for progressive politics, and that such a politics must be informed by a greater
range of voices than exists at present. But this leaves plenty of room for ambiguity or
indeterminacy, even vagueness. Consider the case of education. It is clear that Sen’s
approach to development would require him to be in favour not just of higher
educational standards for all, but also of forms of school ownership and monitoring
that would involve parents, and of curricula that pay attention to local needs. The
provision and content of education would need to be negotiated with a wide range of
stakeholders, to use the modern jargon. But who will object to this nowadays, at least
in public, and what, if anything, does it tell us about the policies – and politics – that
must be put into place to secure these outcomes? The answers, according to Seabright,
are (a) almost no-one (save for some religious groups, perhaps) and (b) not a great deal
(Seabright, 2001).47
Now, Sen might object that it is not his job to put flesh on the bones of the policy
issues that emerge from his more philosophical reflections. Others are doing this
already, including many who work in the World Bank and who might have drawn
inspiration from his work on capabilities. But this objection would not be entirely
convincing. By not confronting the ‘policy issue’ Sen is cutting himself off from some of
the criticisms that have been raised before in this paper, and which bear on his
conceptions of governance and politics.
Consider, for example, the question of primary education not in Kerala, but in West
Bengal, a State in India that has been ruled since 1977 by a democratically elected Left
Front government, with leadership being provided by cadres of the Communist Party
of India, Marxist (CPM). Notwithstanding this government’s achievements in the areas
of agrarian reform and decentralized governance (the ‘red panchayats’, or councils),
there is little that distinguishes the educational performance of some rural areas of West
Bengal from that of its neighbour to the west, the notoriously casteist and mismanaged
State of Bihar. According to a recent study, levels of school attendance were less than
15% in one village in Malda District, West Bengal, despite strong demand for ‘good
education’ from many parents.48 Moreover, we know what is going wrong: too little
money is going into rural primary education; there are competing demands on the time
of some children; and parents exercise too few controls over schoolteachers (many of
whom are absent but drawing a salary). But what is to be done?
Empowering parents by setting up Village Education Committees is surely part of the
answer, but these Committees need to have teeth. Similar Committees have existed for
several years in Bihar, but they have rarely dented the powers of the local elites, and
some members of the Scheduled Communities (the so-called Untouchables and tribals)
who are listed as Committee members still have no idea that they have been so
appointed. Until January 2001 these Committees lacked any disciplinary powers over
absentee teachers, and there continues to be a problem in persuading local politicians
that education matters. Many politicians prefer to spend their time in the administra-
tion of ‘development’ projects, where there is ample scope for leakage of funds, rather
than on education, which as yet promises little in terms of money or votes.
None of this means that making education a priority is not vitally important, or that
progress cannot be made. But it does suggest that new ways have to be found ‘to align
the interests and incentives of political leaders with those of the rest [I would say the
poorest] of society’ (Seabright, 2001: 42). Appeals to the better nature of politicians, or
to the national interest, might help in this respect, and Sen is right to argue that an
ideology of egalitarianism (in this case an equal right to primary education) can be used
to shame or cajole leaders into political actions that respond less to self-interest than to
a sense of social justice. Nevertheless, a healthy measure of scepticism is also in order,
as the experience of 50 years of weak social development in India too readily confirms.
Empowering the poor to make demands for education is an important part of the story,
but who is going to take a lead in this process of mobilization, and how precisely are
they going to challenge the powers of vested interests? In Bihar it is difficult to imagine
much progress being made in the near future. In West Bengal, however, progress might
be made if the CPM can be persuaded to turn its attention from issues of ‘production’
to ‘reproduction’, and if it uses its disciplined party apparatus to further politicize the
panchayats (and VECs) in a manner that empowers the poorest. But this in turn suggests
that the CPM must recapture some of its radical or campaigning edge, and this task is
not made easier by the activities of the opposition Trinamool Congress in some con-
stituencies. (Significantly, literacy levels seem to be higher in those areas – such as parts
of Midnapore District – where a strong and largely uncontested CPM presence helped
to facilitate a transfer of social assets to the rural poor, and where the party has been
able to impose its will on the local bureaucracy).49 It also suggests that a greater
S. Corbridge 207
measure of discipline and confrontational politics might be called for than Sen seems
willing to recognize. This does not mean that the CPM should disregard the demands
of the rural poor, or that it should impose an educational programme upon them that
would cause significant opposition from largely middle-class teachers. But it is to
suggest that a political party might be able to aid the empowerment of the poor to the
extent that it maintains discipline over its cadres (as Atul Kohli suggested some years
ago: Kohli, 1987), and to the extent that it directly challenges the powers of those who
are opposed to such empowerment. More bluntly stated, it is to suggest that the
expansion of Sen’s five instrumental freedoms will not be achieved in most countries
(whether or not they are formally democratic) in the absence of a politics that is con-
frontational as well as cooperative.50
One reason for labouring this point concerns the ways in which some theorists of
‘good governance’ neglect the matter of social power, or define good governance
simply in terms of civil service reforms or calls for greater ‘participation’. Sen comes
close to this position, I think, and while it would be absurd to argue against civil service
reforms that create a heightened sense of professionalism (see Tendler, 1997), or against
greater public accountability, we need to be wary of assuming that decentralization of
powers will necessarily empower the poor or that ‘participation’ means a great deal
where it is not linked to command over resources. Writing of south India, Marguerite
Robinson notes that the rural poor in Mallannapalle gram panchayat, Andhra Pradesh,
have slowly been empowered by universal suffrage and by the tightening of labour
markets that followed on from the Green Revolution. But she further argues that: ‘The
centre, and where feasible the state governments, should play an increasingly active
role – not only in directing resources and messages, but also by neutralizing, co-opting
and bypassing the elites and by identifying, guiding, and monitoring the intended
receivers’ (Robinson, 1988: 272–73) – the elites in this case being those local male heads
of household who stand to benefit most from some forms of decentralization.
In a sense, of course, this recommendation begs the question of ‘state capability’ that
I raised earlier, but it does have the virtue of directing attention to the capabilities of
agencies other than private individuals. Robinson’s work also raises questions about
the importance of popular struggles, and it is on this note that I want to conclude my
discussion. If ‘affirmative action’ policies have been at all effective in India – and there
is some evidence to suggest that they have been, both in economic and in political
terms51 – it is largely because they have been demanded and made to work by members
of the ‘Backward Classes’. Much the same might be said of the demands pressed by
farmers’ movements in the 1980s or 1990s, or by women’s groups. Moreover, if lower
caste groups in Bihar have won a greater measure of respect (izzat) from their erstwhile
‘betters’, it is due in no small part to the mobilizations of Yadavs and Kurmis as Yadavs
and Kurmis, and even to the violent actions of Naxalite groups including Liberation
and the Maoist Coordination Centre (MCC). These mobilizations have had obvious
costs, but this may be unavoidable in Bihar.52 The development of freedoms is not easily
secured, nor is it the case that the expansion of one set of individual freedoms always
goes hand in hand with another. Social conflict is integral to the process of securing
greater freedoms for many groups among the urban and rural poor, the more so,
perhaps, in countries that lack such democratic freedoms as India might have. Failure
to highlight the importance of conflict or struggle in the securing of basic human needs
is akin, I think, to denying that there might be a causal link between ‘good authoritari-
an rule’ and the expansion of some positive freedoms. It would be nice to think that
conflicts or discipline might not be needed to secure social change, but a conception of
political space that refuses to foreground the link between political struggle and the
redistribution of public and private resources is more attuned to the comforting fictions
of the World Bank than to many social realities, including those in some cities of the
USA.53
VI Conclusion
This paper has provided an appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen, particularly as it
relates to development studies. Very much in line with Sen’s own approach, I want to
use this conclusion not to restate the main points of the paper but to make some broader
observations.
It goes without saying that Amartya Sen’s contributions to development studies have
been remarkable. His work has inspired not only his colleagues but also two or three
generations of graduate students, and not least those who came into the discipline in
the 1980s when the very enterprise of ‘development economics’ was being challenged
by critics on the Right. The fact that Sen took on board some of the points made by
Albert Hirschmann, Ian Little or even Peter Bauer, while also insisting on some of the
insights of a more ‘traditional’ development economics, helped to steady the ship and
encouraged the emergence of a broader development studies with an emphasis on insti-
tutions, governance and state–market synergies.54 Perhaps more significantly, Sen’s
analyses of poverty and famines, or of hunger and public action, were as uplifting as
they were eye-opening. I say this because they seemed to reinstate the importance of
public policy. By denaturalizing the causes of poverty and famine, Sen at once renewed
the case for an ‘activist state’ and suggested that the intelligent pursuit of ‘economic
science’ didn’t have to be dismal in terms of its implications, or reductionist in terms of
its treatment of people and places. One of the many virtues of Development as freedom is
that it has allowed Sen to place these agendas before a wider public. Although
Seabright complains that some passages are hard to read, the book is surely not too
demanding for the intelligent lay reader. My undergraduate students have told me that
they find it stimulating and inspiring. Stimulating, because many of the ideas are new
to them, and inspiring because it suggests that actions to expand the freedoms of the
poor should be at the heart of public policy.
Of course, some students are also critical of some parts of the book. Any book making
such grand claims as Development as freedom is bound to engender a measure of debate
or even dissent, and this paper has tried to identify both the strengths and weaknesses
of Sen’s approach to development as freedom. In many respects these go together, for
the very breadth of Sen’s thesis suggests where it might be most vulnerable. In
particular, there is a tension in Sen’s work between his celebration of individual
freedom in an intrinsic or foundational sense and his use of examples that suggest that
the curtailment of individual freedoms can have beneficial impacts for the poor as a
whole or for some named social group. To put it another way, while there is plenty of
evidence to suggest that positive freedoms have been rapidly expanded under some
forms of authoritarian rule, Sen is unwilling to read this evidence in a manner that
would disrupt his remarks on the positive sum nature of development as freedom.
S. Corbridge 209
There is then a danger of constructing a thesis that is not open to refutation.

A second area of concern relates to the first. At the heart of Sen’s work is a
commitment to individual freedom, and for good reason. As I mentioned previously,
this commitment guards Sen against a form of cultural relativism that is politically
disabling, and which at worst would not allow us to say that torture is wrong. Better
still, Sen’s commitment to a minimalist universalism allows him to denounce the abom-
inations of illiteracy or underprovided health care or the foreshortened life-chances of
many Afro-Americans. There are no weasel words here. All human individuals have a
right to expect a life of dignity and freedom from avoidable ignorance or disease. But
Sen’s commitment to the individual is not always backed up by sensitivity to the claims
of individuals acting in social groups, and especially not those groups adopting what
he calls a narrow identity. Here again we run into difficulties that arise from the
normative bias of Sen’s work (his desire to celebrate individual freedom) and the
possibility that the freedoms of many poor people are best expanded by collective
mobilizations (not all of which are especially ‘liberal’).
Let me finish by returning to the politics of caste in India. I do not deny that
democracy has deepened in India over the past 50 years.55 The rural poor are now more
likely to turn out for the national elections than are India’s well-to-do, and they are less
prone to vote for the candidate of one of their erstwhile patrons. But if the poor in many
of India’s States are refusing the vertical relationships of patron–client politics, at least
at the ballot box, this does not mean they are voting as individuals, or that it would
make sense for them to vote in such terms. They are more often voting as part of
‘horizontal’ voting blocs, usually defined in terms of caste. In so doing they are
changing the nature of caste itself, for they are using their caste identities much as an
ethnic group would.56 While they are not challenging the ideology of the ‘caste system’,
they are challenging the idea that social power has to reside with the Forward Castes,
or that Brahmins or Kshatriyas are somehow better than Kurmis or Yadavs. Just as
importantly, they are confirming that the prosecution of a political agenda in terms of a
restrictive identity can be empowering and thus highly rational, at least for that social
group. Resources tend to flow to those in power. In doing so they are also presenting a
challenge to the work of Amartya Sen, or to one aspect of that body of work. It would
be nice to think that ‘economic development’ will come first to those countries that
maximize the spaces of individual (intrinsic and instrumental) freedoms. For better or
worse, however, this might not be the case. The pursuit of intrinsic freedoms is
sometimes encouraged by a restriction on some individual freedoms or identities,
however much we wish this was not so. Sen is surely right to insist that development
is, finally, about freedom. But to become ‘developed’ is not simply a matter of
maximizing individual freedoms. Development also involves concerted struggles
against the powers of vested interests, at all spatial scales. It remains a difficult and
sometimes dispiriting or even dangerous social project, as many poor people realize
only too well.57
Acknowledgements
For their constructive and prompt remarks on an earlier draft of this paper I am grateful
to John Harriss, Craig Jeffrey, Sanjay Kumar, Pilar Saborio, Manoj Srivastava, Rene
Veron and Glyn Williams. I am also grateful to Rob Potter and three anonymous
referees for PIDS. My thanks, too, to Gary Gaile, Susan Clarke and Tony Bebbington in
Boulder, and to Andrew Wyatt in Bristol for their encouragement, and to Amartya Sen
himself for kindly reading a first draft of the paper.
Notes
1. The use of the word ‘spaces’ is neither accidental nor (entirely) a conceit. The second section of
this paper considers the different (economic and moral) spaces of evaluation that have
concerned Sen: it picks up a word to be found repeatedly in his work. The third section of the
paper uses ‘space’ in a more traditional or geographical sense. The fourth and fifth sections
consider the extent to which Sen makes space for culture and politics in his work.
2. Although the Sen family home was in Dhaka, the young Sen was schooled in part by Tagore at
Santinikiten in present-day West Bengal, India. Sen’s maternal grandfather was the author of a
justly famous book on Hinduism that remains in print (Sen, K.M., 1972).
3. Although Sen already had a BA degree from Calcutta University, he was required by
Cambridge to take another BA before enrolling as a graduate student. As Sen has noted in his
Nobel autobiography, his early career was consistently beset by worries about his relative
youth: he gained his BA from Calcutta while still a teenager, and was forced to sit on his PhD
by the Cambridge authorities because of a ruling that PhDs must take a minimum of 3 years to
produce. During this period he was appointed to a Chair in Economics at Jadavpur University,
Calcutta, at the age of 23, an appointment that ‘caused a predictable – and entirely understand-
able – storm of protest’ (retrieved March 2001 from: http://www.nobel.se/economics/
laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html page 6).
4. Sen was Professor of Economics at the University of Delhi from 1963 to 1971, and Professor of
Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1971 to 1977.
5. Sen was appointed to a Chair in Economics at Oxford in 1977 and to the Drummond
Professorship in 1980. He left Oxford for Harvard in 1987 and remained there until 1998.
6. See Drèze and Sen (1989, 1995); Drèze et al. (1995); Foster and Sen (1997).
7. Dasgupta et al. (1972). The UNIDO guidelines were published shortly after and in contradis-
tinction to the manual for industrial project analysis in developing countries produced by Little
and Mirlees in 1969 (see also Little and Mirlees, 1974).
8. Sen’s work for the UNDP flowed in part from his collaboration with the late Dr Mahbub ul Haq,
the initiator of the Human Development Reports.
9. As such, they have taken their cue from Sen, who generally conducts these exchanges with wit,
generosity of spirit and a proper seriousness of purpose. Some critics have jibed about Sen’s
politics, but it is only in the exchanges with Peter Nolan that one detects an impatience in Sen’s
dealings (see Nolan, 1993; Sen, 1993).
10. The collaboration is evident, for example, in the collection of essays that Nussbaum and Sen
edited on The quality of life (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993).
11. In 1982 Sen edited a collection of essays on ‘utilitarianism and beyond’ with the philosopher
Bernard Williams.
12. The classic text of modern libertarianism is Robert Nozick’s account of Anarchy, state and utopia
(1974). Sen taught a class with Rawls and Nozick when he was at Harvard.
13. This says that, ‘the social and economic inequalities attached to offices and positions are to be
adjusted so that, whatever the level of those inequalities, whether great or small, they are to the
greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society’ (Rawls, 1996: 6–7).
14. It might be argued that Sen focuses too readily on the ways in which poor or exploited people
adjust to their situations, rather on the forms of resistance that they might deploy – compare
with Scott (1985).
15. See Corbridge (1993) for a discussion.
16. For a judicious review of the evidence and estimates, see Klasen (1994). See also Raju et al.
(1997).
S. Corbridge 211
17. For disturbing accounts of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida, see Ackerman (2001) and
Danner (2001).
18. Sen has acknowledged his debt to the work of Barbara Harriss (1995) and Nancy Folbre (1986),
amongst others.
19. For an interesting review of two recent books by Nussbaum (1999, 2000), and one that
anticipates some of the ‘cultural’ concerns I review in Section IV, see Spelman (2000).
20. For an excellent account of capitals and capabilities, which draws on Sen to discuss questions of
rural livelihoods, poverty and peasant viability, see Bebbington (1999).
21. These observations after Kapur (1999a: 4).
22. This claim has been challenged by Brian Barry (1986) and Pieter Vanhuysee (2000).
23. It is worth noting, though, that Sen has kept his Indian citizenship. He has also used money
from his Nobel Prize to set up the Pratichi India Trust and the Pratichi Bangladesh Trust. The
first of these trusts will be mainly concerned with the issue of illiteracy, and the second with that
of gender inequality (interview with Kapur, 1999b: 9).
24. See Sen and Sengupta (1983).
25. For a critical review of the literature, see Sirowy and Inkeles (1990);
26. See the classic commentaries on South Korea and Taiwan by Amsden (1989) and Wade (1990).
See also the important review article by Akyuz et al. (1998).
27. T.C. Smith (1957) long ago argued that the agrarian origins of Japanese capitalism were to be
found in the Tokugawa era.
28. As Ashutosh Varshney puts it, writing of the former, ‘democracy is a continuous variable
(expressed as “more” or “less”) not a discrete variable (expressed as “yes” or “no”)’ (Varshney,
1998: 19).
29. It is significant that the World Bank began to invest heavily in the concept of ‘good governance’
only after the ending of the Cold War (see World Bank, 1992).
30. As Adrian Leftwich put it some years ago: ‘In short, and uncomfortably, democratic politics is
seldom the politics of radical economic change’ (Leftwich, 1993: 614; see also Kohli, 990).
31. This is true notwithstanding that a majority of authoritarian regimes prioritize the demands of
these elites. My point, rather, is that there are elite-oriented authoritarian regimes (as, for
example, in many Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s); authoritarian regimes that
define themselves as ‘people’s democracies’ (even where a new political elite then arises, as in
China); and authoritarian regimes where a new ruling class has arrived from ‘abroad’ (as in
Taiwan) or has been partly imposed by outsiders (as in post-war Japan and South Korea). It is
in these last two cases that a greater possibility arises for ‘effective authoritarian rule’, at least in
the short- to medium-term and from the perspective of the poor.
32. For a review of the evidence from Asia, see Hamilton (1989).
33. In a review of DAF in Business Week, Geri Smith notes that while Sen ‘criticizes repressive China
for its one-child policy, he praises its record on education and health care, leaving one to wonder
whether Sen is right about democracy’s key role in the eradication of poverty’ (Smith, 1999).
34. For a review, see the discussion in chapter 9 of Corbridge and Harriss (2000).
35. On the Bihar famine of 1967, see Singh (1975). On the famine conditions that periodically affect
parts of Kalahandi District, see Currie (1993) and Sainath (1996).
36. For a defence of Maoist economic planning that is based on considerable local-level research, see
Bramall (1993).
37. Difficulties that speak to the weakness of the state in Kerala, arguably (and not least when
compared with China or South Korea, where similar transitions have been pushed through).
38. My colleague Rene Veron tells me that the Rani of Travancore issued a decree that made
education compulsory in 1806. He further suggests that ‘more than “democracy”, [it was] caste-
based movements, particularly the one led by Sri Narayan Guru (of the [erstwhile]
“untouchable” Ezheva caste) [that] brought about social development. This caste-based
movement can be interpreted, rather than an offspring of political and civic freedoms, as a
reaction to extremely repressive socio-cultural conditions in Kerala at the turn of the century’
(R. Veron, personal communication, 2001; see also Veron, 2001).
39. By Dumontian, I mean those who would follow Louis Dumont in arguing that caste Hindus
dance to a different beat from many in the West: that their social worlds are based upon the
priority of the sacred over the temporal (the priest over the king), and/or that they follow a
conception of social order based upon an ideology of biologized hierarchy and not of incipient
equalitarianism (see Dumont, 1970; see also Saberwal, 1996).
40. One of his most famous essays is a critique of the ‘rational fools’ that so abound in the
behavioural assumptions of the economics literature: CWM (chapter 4).
41. For an outstanding account of the merits of ‘political secularism’, see Bhargava (1994). For a
perspective on the rights of religious minorities that draws on Sen, but that reaches different
conclusions, see Chandhoke (1999).
42. See, in particular, Chatterjee (1994), Madan (1987, 1997) and Nandy (1985, 1990, 1998).
43. Although it has been suggested to me by an anthropologist with long experience of West Africa
that there might indeed be empirical referents for this claim.
44. Albeit a very strong one if we define female genital mutilation as an act of violence, and if we
oppose an entire category of such violent acts.
45. Smith is an important figure in Sen’s argument, for various reasons. Sen’s third wife, Emma
Rothschild, is an authority on Smith (Rothschild, 1992, 2001), and his remarks on the right not
to be shamed in public draw on Smith, as they do also on Rawls.
46. Sen recounts that he first read Arrow’s (1951) essay on social choice and individual values
in the ‘early months of 1952’, when he was at Presidency College in Calcutta. It was his ‘brilliant
co-student [the late] Sukhamoy Chakravarty’ who drew Sen’s attention to the book, and with
whom Sen discussed its political implications: retrieved March 2001 from: http://
www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio-html (p. 4). For a discussion of the
work of Gerard Debreu (1959), see OEI (see also DAF: 117–19).
47. I might note here that I read Seabright’s occasionally harsh critique of DAF as I was nearing the
end of a first draft of this paper.
48. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study of the state, rural poverty and empowerment in five
villages/Blocks/Districts in erstwhile Bihar and West Bengal: Corbridge et al. (2001), Veron et al.
(2001). See also Harriss (1999) on regime types.
49. Here again we see the tensions that can exist between what Rudolph and Rudolph (1987) once
called ‘command’ and ‘demand’ politics. While it is true that a campaigning pro-poor political
party is often kept on its mark by an active opposition (see Echeverri-Gent, 1993 and Rogaly,
1998 for sometimes critical commentaries on the CPM in West Bengal), it is also true that its
capacity to govern (or command) can be weakened by the activities of its more populist
opponents, as is the case in Malda District.
50. I am not arguing that Sen is, or is likely to be, opposed to a political party that combines a
coherent and stable leadership, a clear pro-lower class ideology, a strong base of cadres who are
active in the countryside, and a sensitivity to democratic norms (which is roughly how Kohli
describes the CPM in West Bengal; 1987: 227–28). My point, simply, is that Sen tells us very little
about his understandings of or commitment to such a politics, or a political party/regime in this
mould. Sen, rather like Rawls and Habermas (despite an interesting debate between these last
two; Habermas, 1995; Rawls, 1996, lecture IX), writes more often of a politics that places its faith
in an appeal to public reason (that is somewhat akin to Rawls’s appeal a ‘veil of ignorance’ or
to Habermas’s appeal to an ‘ideal speech situation’ – and see also a further variant upon this
theme by Scanlon 1998). This is an important component of any politics that would wish to style
itself as ‘progressive’: we need ideas to fight for, as the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles
very clearly showed (and as have some Truth Commissions after the struggle was won). But we
surely also need the struggles themselves, and the political mobilizations, parties and
leaderships that go with them, even if there is a danger of some disregard for the human rights
of those to whom they are opposed. The need for such a politics is the more obvious when we
consider that ‘vested interests’ have coherent ideas of their own that they will defend in the
court of public reason.
51. For recent reviews of ‘compensatory discrimination’ in India, see Chandra (2000); Corbridge
(2000); and Parry (1999). See also Galanter (1991) and Shah (1996).
52. For a recent assessment of the Naxalite movement in central Bihar, see Bhatia (2000); see also
S. Corbridge 213
Mammen (1999). If my wording seems callous it needs to be borne in mind that the poor in
north India (and not just north India) suffer from an extraordinary degree of ‘everyday violence’
(from the police and forest guards, as well as from wealthier landholders, local political bosses,
and from grinding poverty) that makes a mockery of some aspects of India’s democracy. For a
small sample of relevant writings, see Breman (1985); Brass (1987); Sinha (1991); Mendelsohn
and Vicziany (1998). For an interesting account of an attempt to hold officialdom to account, see
Jenkins and Goetz (1999).
53. This reference to the comforting fictions of the World Bank is aimed at some of the rhetoric that
emerges from that institution at a Directorial or geopolitical level (and see Harriss, 2001).
Elsewhere, the Bank continues to publish some remarkably challenging and innovative work,
including, most recently, a series of books that attempts to present the ‘voices of the poor’: see
Narayan et al. (2000a, b); Narayan and Petesch (2001).
54. See his essay on ‘Development: which way now?’ in RVD: and refer to Bauer (1971, 1981);
Hirschmann (1981); and Little (1982). For a more extreme attack on the so-called poverty of
‘development economics, see Lal (1983), and see also the reply by Stewart (1985).
55. For convincing discussions, see Austin (1993) and Yadav (1996).
56. For an interesting account, see Mitra (1994).
57. This comment should not be taken as a critique of the aims or of the partial achievements of
‘development’. Like Sen, I take the view that ‘development’ should have proceeded more
rapidly since 1950, but I also recognize that the Age of Development has been associated with
more rapid and sustained increases in global life expectancies than has any previous half-
century in human history (see also Corbridge, 1998).
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Progress in Development Studies 2,3 (2002) pp.

Development as freedom: the spaces

Key words: authoritarianis m, development, difference, freedom, liberalism, spaces of

© Arnold 2002 10.1191/1464993402ps037r a

economic evaluation which relied on utilitarianism or libertarianism, or on the work of

II The spaces of economic evaluation

able to overcome the weaknesses that he detects in utilitarianism and libertarianism. If

Figure 1 Mortality rate ratios of blacks to white (aged 35–54 years),

III The spaces of geography

The development of Sen’s approach to ‘development as freedom’ has had significant

development. In one sense this is true by definition. If development is about participa-

IV The spaces of culture

2 The politics of toleration

3 Contending ultimate values

V The spaces of politics

alternatives) would lead to some inconsistency or infelicity, unless we go for the

There is then a danger of constructing a thesis that is not open to refutation.

Ackerman, B. 2001: Anatomy of a constitutional editors, Foundations of social choice theory.

Buiter, W . and Srinivasan, T. 1987: Rewarding Oxford University Press/WIDER.

University Press, 128–69. Journal of Political Economy 78, 152–57 (also in

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