“Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else”. So writes Aristotle in his Nicomahean Ethics. So quotes Amartya Sen in the final chapter of his book, Development As Freedom. Sen quotes Aristotle at the end of Development As Freedom (Random House, New York, 1999) for the purpose of reinforcing what he has been saying throughout twelve chapters, an introduction and a preface. It is therefore most appropriate to begin a commentary on Sen’s book with a quote that is both the book’s ending and its foundation. His point is that although some of the recent literature on the subject of development has concentrated on limited indicators of development such as the growth of GNP, there have always been those thinkers with broader ideas. It is such broad thinkers as Aristotle, along with the likes of Petty, Smith and Marx who also believed “that the enhancement of freedom is ultimately an important motivating factor for assessing economic and social change”1, who have influenced Sen.
Such an emphasis on breadth, together with the emphases on complexity, diversity, complementarity and the agency of individuals that are also both foundations and constant themes through this book, will sound very familiar to World Federalists. In fact, another way to have begun this commentary would have been to have speculated on the dinner table conversation in Sen’s household. As many readers will know, Sen married Spinelli’s daughter. We can well imagine then that terms such as ‘federalism’, ‘complexity’ and ‘subsidiarity’ would have been common dinner parlance along with “Please pass the salt” and “How was your day?”. We might even go so far as to imagine such dinner table conversations resulting in this book that articulates the importance of viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms and understanding their interconnections. The weekly publication, The Economist, a publication of which I am an avid reader, offers a third way of beginning this commentary on Development As Freedom. It sums up the purpose of Sen’s book on its own back cover. “The perspective that Mr. Sen describes and advocates has great attractions. Chief among them is that, by cutting through the sterile debate for or against the market, it makes it easier to ask sharper questions about public policy”.
In so cutting through the sterile debate and making it easier to ask sharper questions about public policy, Amartya Sen writes well, clearly and in a manner very readable to those who have only dabbled on the surface of the field of economics. This book, Development As Freedom, reads particularly well to a World Federalist. It reads of the interconnectedness of society, of individual lives and of life on this planet. It begins by stating that it is not a question of whether certain political or social freedoms are or are not conducive to development, but rather that “these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constitutive components of development. …These freedoms and rights are also very effective in contributing to economic progress”2.
Sen does not, however provide a nice, easy, neat and tidy formula for how the relationship amongst these interconnections, these substantive freedoms that are among the constitutive components of development as freedom, are going to work exactly. Like any committed and knowledgeable World Federalist, Sen knows that the way forward will be messy. He also knows that “Individuals live and operate in a world of institutions. Our opportunities and prospects depend crucially on what institutions exist and how they function. Not only do institutions contribute to our freedoms, their roles can be sensibly evaluated in the light of their contributions to our freedom. To see development as freedom provides a perspective in which institutional assessment can systematically occur”3. World Federalism indeed!
Sen is as convinced of the need to see people as agents, as those capable of acting on behalf of both themselves and others, as he is on the need to “focus on capability deprivation (rather than only on income poverty)”4. In discussing capability, he reminds us that it is not just all about income poverty and income inequity, but that other deprivations “such as unemployment, ill health, lack of education, and social exclusion” also need very much to be considered in any development conversation or action. Or, as he states it in the positive when speaking of instrumental freedoms, political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective security all not only contribute to the capacity of individuals to live more freely, but they complement each other. It is the way that these instrumental freedoms are linked to each other that strengthens what he believes is the importance of freedom as not only the primary object of development but also its principal means5. Development as freedom is about complementarity, a concept and way of being and governing in the world that World Federalists know so well.
In expanding on his remarks about individual agency, Sen begins by reminding us that we live in a world whose opulence would have been hard to imagine a century or two ago. Also hard to imagine a century or two ago would have been the extent to which, in recent decades, participatory governance, democracy, has emerged as a preeminent model of political organization. And the world is more interconnected in trade, commerce, communication, ideas and ideals than it has ever been. Poverty is still very much a reality, however, political freedoms are violated, the rights of women remain tenuous in many regions and the environment becomes less and less sustainable. Development is about working to overcome these issues and problems, and there are social, political and economic dimensions involved in such working. Sen also believes, however, in not only the role of freedoms of different kinds in addressing these pressing issues, but also very much in the centrality of individual agency and the complementarity between the two. Development is, in his view, about the removal of what he calls ‘unfreedoms’, those things “that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency”. “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”6.
Amartya Sen uses specific, concrete examples of the theoretical points he is making only sparingly in Development As Freedom, and as someone who is not an economist, I could have wished for more examples to illustrate his thinking. But those that he does use are well chosen, graphic and extremely memorable. Anyone not yet convinced of the imperative to consider multiple, diverse and interconnecting issues in the field of development, anyone who is perhaps not yet a World Federalist may be deeply persuaded by such examples as the mortality rate for African-American men. Sen shows that African-American men in the developed country of the United States actually have a lower chance of reaching an advanced age than do men of a substantial number of developing countries. The relative income of African-American men may be much higher than that of men of any number of developing countries, but it is statistically clear that although they have a lower infant mortality rate, they are much less likely to live to old age. “Social arrangements and community relations such as medical coverage, public health care, school education, law and order, prevalence of violence and so on” all play roles in a statistically lower life span for African-American men. The relationships amongst different societal factors matter”7.
As a World Federalist, I found it very gratifying and inspiring to read Development As Freedom, as our perspective is so well articulated and defined, and by a Nobel prize winner in economics no less. Sen, however, does not let us rest easy in our beliefs and strategies, but provides substantive challenge as well as affirmation and articulation. He states: “Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women. This is indeed a crucial aspect of ‘development as freedom’ ”8. As World Federalists, we are very good at ‘talking the talk’ on this issue, as the expression goes, but much less good in ‘walking the walk’ in terms of our successive planning and encouragement of the leadership of women. We are also challenged by such statements as: “The rights of minorities often have to be preserved against the intrusion of a majority’s persecution and its grand gains in utility”9. It is time for us to have some substantive conversations about how we define ‘minorities’ and intimately related to that question and very timely in the context in which this commentary is being written, how we understand such current realities as the Arab Spring in World Federalist terms.
Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen was written in 1999, but thirteen years later it reads as fresh and timely. It speaks strongly and articulately to the values and ideas that World Federalists espouse. We world federalists could, if we so choose, read this book as a kind of ‘prooftext’ for what we struggle so hard to say to and live in the world. However, and it is ‘However’ with a capital ‘H’, perhaps the book also reads in such a fresh and timely fashion because the world has made so little progress towards the ‘development as freedom’ that Sen describes and advocates. As we live and move and have our being in the expression of subsidiarity, complexity, complementarity and the celebration of unity in diversity, we should commit ourselves to re-reading Sen’s words once a decade, we should commit ourselves to living them every day.
1 Amartya Sen, Development As Freedom, Random House, New York, 1999, p. 289
2 Ibidem, p. 5
3 Ibidem, p. 142
4 Ibidem, p. 137
5 Ibidem, p. 38
6 Ibidem, pp. xi-xii
7 Ibidem, pp. 21-2
8 Ibidem, p. 203
9 Ibidem, p. 212