The breadth of vision, intellectual acuity and striking humanity of one of the world's leading public intellectuals have never been more clearly shown than in this remarkable book.
Is justice an ideal, forever beyond our grasp, or something that
may actually guide our practical decisions and enhance our lives? This work
presents an alternative approach to mainstream theories of justice which,
despite their many specific achievements have taken us, he argues, in the wrong
direction in general.
One of the principal differences between Sen and the dominant
contemporary theorists of justice is that they have been concerned primarily,
sometimes wholly, with identifying what perfectly just social arrangements
might be, rather than clarifying how different realizations of justice might be
compared and evaluated. While most of the mainstream theorists follow one of
the two major traditions of Enlightenment thinking, that of a hypothetical
‘social contract’ pursued by Hobbed, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and in our own time
by the leading contemporary political philosopher John Rawls, Sen’s analysis
significantly advances the other Enlightenment tradition of reducing injustice
pursued in different ways by Smith, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Mill
and Marx.
At the heart of Sen's argument is his insistence on the role of public reason in establishing what can make societies less unjust. But it is in the nature of reasoning about justice, argues Sen, that it does not allow all questions to be settled even in theory; there are choices to be faced between alternative assessments of what is reasonable; and, several different and competing positions can each be well-defended. Far from rejecting such pluralities or trying to reduce them beyond the limits of reasoning, we should make use of them to construct a theory of justice that can absorb divergent points of view. Sen also shows how concern about the principles of justice in the modern world must avoid parochialism, and further, address questions of global injustice.
The breadth of vision, intellectual acuity and striking humanity of one of the world's leading public intellectuals have never been more clearly shown than in this remarkable book.
Selling Rights | Indian Sub-Continent Only |
Packing Weight | 1 kg |
ISBN | 9781846141480 |
Author | Amartya Sen |
Publisher | Penguin Publication |
Language | English |
Page count | 467 |
Book Format | Hard Bound |