Amartya Sen (1933—)

J. Gay Meeks

Introduction

One day there will have to be another chapter. Sen’s path-breaking contributions happily show no sign of slowing down in his 82nd year, so this account of them must be incomplete. But there is no disguising the fact that it will anyway suffer from incompleteness. This is partly because of the difficulty of doing justice to his vast existing list of publications in this limited space, with the permitted bibliography very restricted.¹ But it is not only that space is short and that more generally, as Sen says, ‘description inevitably involves selection’ (Sen 1980a: 367). It is also that so wide-ranging a list of writings invites diverse views on how best to choose.

That is not the only difficulty this author faces in writing this chapter on Sen for The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics: in seeking to do justice to him, it is not straightforward just to focus on Cambridge or just on economics either.

¹ A familiar disclaimer in accounts of Sen. The omissions here will still seem glaring to some, so, as Sen once put it in relation to creating an unusually long list, ‘I am steeling myself against elevated eyebrows’ (Sen 1992: xiv). ^[1]

Take location first. Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contribution to welfare economics, and there is a strong sense in which all Nobel Laureates, wherever they are based, are world figures. But, further and more perplexingly for the purpose, this is a man so intimately linked with three continents that he truly spans East and West. A citizen of India, born in 1933 in Santiniketan, West Bengal, he gained his early education in Dhaka (his family’s traditional home) and Santiniketan. He took his first degree (BA 1953, Economics major, Mathematics minor, with First Class Honours) at the University of Calcutta (Presidency College) and writes in his Nobel Laureate biographical note (Sen 1998, on which I lean heavily in this section) that this was a very formative period.^[2] He found the academic ethos of Presidency College ‘captivating’, enjoyed the excellent teaching and the mathematical approach to economics, and was bowled over by reading Arrows newly published Social Choice and Individual Values. During this period, Sen’s thinking was also influenced by the political situation in India: this made him acutely aware of ‘foundational disputes’ between single-minded pursuit of distributional equity on the one hand and tolerance of plurality on the other, foreshadowing the central focus of his work in economics.

It was at this point that he came to Europe; and here begins his association with Cambridge economics. Notwithstanding his BA, he was entered for the Tripos^[3] (BA 1955) before admission to the PhD (awarded in 1959). He pays tribute to outstanding fellow students and staff whom he had met at Calcutta, and in Cambridge too he welcomed the chance to meet some exceptional economists among student contemporaries who shared his interest in foundational issues (including Samuel Brittan, Mahbub ul Haq, Michael Nicholson, Luigi Pasinetti, Pierangelo Garegnani, Luigi Spaventa, Geoff Harcourt, and Charles Feinstein), as well as among the Faculty. But, with the ideals of toleration and pluralism he had brought with him from India, he did not find the atmosphere in the Faculty congenial, calling this a ‘desert of constant feuding’ (between proponents of Keynes such as Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor, and Joan Robinson and sceptics such as Dennis Robertson, Harry Johnson, and Michael Farrell). This was an awkward battleground to traverse for someone with ‘close relations with economists on both sides’, only a little moderated by the presence of ‘a number of fine teachers who did not get very involved’ (including Richard Stone, Brian Reddaway, Robin Matthews, Kenneth Berrill, Aubrey Silberston, and Robin Marris).

Trinity, his chosen college, was a welcome ‘oasis’. There, a much more liberal spirit of friendly academic exchange prevailed among the Economics

Fellows—Maurice Dobb, Piero Sraffa, and Dennis Robertson—in spite of their radically different political and methodological views. Sen ‘had the good fortune of working with all of them and learning greatly from each’.

However, he relates that from Joan Robinson, his admired and ‘brilliant’ but also ‘vigorously intolerant’ PhD supervisor, his views often met with ‘stern reproach.. .for not being quite true to.. .neo-Keynesianism’. He had not been able to find an eager supervisor for his preferred thesis topic—the theory of social choice^[4]—so, encouraged by Dobb, had settled instead on studying choice of techniques in relation to development planning. This marked the start of his extensive research on economic development, referred to in the Nobel citation. The main results in the thesis having been established remarkably swiftly—in a single year—but an elapse of two more years being needed before submission, he was then able to arrange leave from Cambridge, with the appointment of Amiya Dasgupta as his (contrastingly tolerant) overseas supervisor as he returned—or was it escaped?—to Calcutta.

In India, he was appointed at 22 to a Chair in Economics at the new Jadavpur University (not without, as he puts it, an ‘understandable.storm of protest’). But before long he was partially back in Cambridge, as his forthcoming thesis had won him a four-year Prize Fellowship at Trinity, giving him freedom to pursue research of his own choosing. While relishing this opportunity, he again punctuated his time back in Cambridge with a year’s leave, taking this in 19601961 at MIT (incorporating also short visits to Stanford and other American universities). He found MIT ‘an inspiring place’, enjoyed discussions with Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, and others, and writes that it was ‘a great relief to get away from the rather sterile debates that the contending armies were fighting in Cambridge’.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that, after his Prize Fellowship ended and after teaching for two years as Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity, in 1963 he left Cambridge for India once more, becoming Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Delhi—where he found the ‘intellectual atmosphere.. .dynamic’—with further visiting spells in the USA, this time at Berkeley and at Harvard (where, together with Kenneth Arrow and John Rawls, he taught a renowned joint course on social justice). During these years, he was able to carry out the important work on the theory of social choice that the rather different research interests of staff at Cambridge had precluded, his masterful text Collective Choice and Social Welfare being published in 1970.

As Sen commented, looking back, ‘the peripatetic life seems to suit me’. The facts certainly bear this out, for he returned to the UK in 1971—but this time to the ‘gratifying’ intellectual atmosphere of the London School of Economics, where he held a Professorship until 1977. Next came a move to Oxford, where he was Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield for three years, before holding the Drummond Chair of Political Economy at All Souls. He travelled to Cambridge in 1985 to deliver that year’s Tanner Lecture at Clare Hall, on ‘The Standard of Living’ (Sen 1987a). Oxford was where he remained until 1987, when a very sad personal loss led him to change continent again, returning to America and soon to a sustained time at Harvard as Professor of Economics and Philosophy and as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor.

In 1998, Cambridge came into its own once more in a new way when Sen was appointed Master of Trinity (where he remains a Fellow). As mentioned above—happily for Cambridge—it was also in 1998 that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Among his publications during his Trinity tenure were the highly influential books, Development as Freedom (Sen 1999a) and Rationality and Freedom (Sen 2002). I believe he was not much involved in Faculty affairs, but he gave a series of lectures on rationality and he was working in Trinity on ideas that would subsequently appear in The Idea of Justice (Sen 2009).^[5] But this full-time Cambridge period came to an end in 2004 when he resumed his post at Harvard, which he holds at the time of writing (though still returning to Cambridge each year, with research projects held at the Centre for History and Economics, first at King’s, then at Magdalene).^[6]

During the sequence of later moves in his career, Sen has never forsaken his very deep ties with India: remaining an Indian citizen, he frequently heads back to the mother country.^[7] He calculated in 1998 that ‘after my student days in Cambridge in 1953-1956, I guess I have never been away from India for more than six months at a time’; and in recent years, he has been heavily involved in pursuing a ‘life-long commitment’ to re-establish the ancient centre of learning at Nalanda. This culminated in his appointment (2012-2015) as the first Chancellor of the new Nalanda University.

A peripatetic life indeed!

In sum then, Cambridge shares with Calcutta the honour of being Sen’s alma mater. He often returns, has held several Cambridge posts (one at the start of his career, the others after a long time away), and—adding up the various spells—has amassed a good many Trinity years. Cambridge can safely claim parentage of his doctoral work with its application to economic development and—very much through the role of his College—has a particular stake in the special character of his economic thinking and in his recent books. But I must be careful in speaking of his relation to Cambridge economics not to provoke protests across the globe from the prestigious universities mentioned above that fostered his ideas and made him their Professor.^[8] His national and international awards, honours, and professional roles form a dazzling array, too numerous to list—although the most recent I am aware of (the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize) gives another Cambridge connection, with Sen in acceptance celebrating ‘the economic wisdom Keynes brought us’ (Sen 2015), and about to give the prize lecture on—in an echo of Keynes’s title of 1919—‘The Economic Consequences of Austerity’.

Take the discipline issue next. Just as Sen cannot be pinned down to one university, country, or continent, neither is his leading work confined to economics. He is a distinguished philosopher—witness his Professorships at Harvard. His interest in the subject is by no means confined to its relevance for economics (he remarks: ‘While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interest in the two fields far exceeds their intersection’), but what he has drawn from the intersection of the fields has been highly distinctive. Fortunately for this chapter, that interdisciplinary aspect of his approach to economics has strong roots in Cambridge, for these dual specialisms date back to his 1959 election to the Prize Fellowship at Trinity. As already noted, this allowed him, as he gratefully acknowledged, ‘four years of freedom to do anything I liked (no questions asked)’: what he liked^[9] was to branch out into philosophical analysis, broadening his study both because of the intrinsic value of the subject and because of its bearing on the logic of social choice, as well as on related issues of equity and democracy that had already captured his attention in his student days in Calcutta. Gaining this professional expertise in the second discipline meant that thereafter he has been able to bring insights from philosophy to illuminate economic issues as a true specialist in both fields, a position that, though historically familiar, had become very uncommon in the 1960s and 1970s and which he has done much to re-establish. The significance of this is recognised in the Nobel award: ‘By combining tools from economics and philosophy, he has restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems’ (Nobel Prize website 1998).

There is another connection to the Cambridge Economics Faculty here, for Sen’s work in this area furnishes much of the material in an optional M.Phil. paper in the philosophy of economics which has been running continuously since the early 1980s.^[10] This was still an unconventional subject area at the time of its launch, but Sen (then in Oxford) encouraged its pursuit; and in Cambridge, Professors Singh, Deane, Hahn, and Matthews all supported my establishing the new course.

In the light of Sen’s academic biography, this chapter takes licence to focus on the role the early philosophical impetus derived in Cambridge has gone on to play in his work. So space is given to a selection of early papers, each with a philosophical dimension, in which Sen’s constructive questioning of standard economic presumptions began, and which led up to the influential, philosophically rich, volumes appearing in or worked on during his Trinity Mastership. Sen frequently refers back to these feisty early arguments and the debates they provoked, and his tenacious pursuit of the main lines of thought—from first moves pinpointing the problematic issues, through a brimming series of extensions and adjustments, to a major drawing together of all the elements of the case—allows some short-circuiting of description of the intervening play. But even within the selected portion of the chosen strand of Sen’s economic thought, the sample presented is restricted, perhaps biased, in that the arguments highlighted are those the author reckons best geared to give the flavour of the rest and tempt readers to explore further, by representing a central aspect of his very distinctive method of approach and showing how it has sparked new areas of debate. So extensive is the printed menu of Sen’s work that, for all the restrictions imposed on it here, the diet remains really rich.

The unifying theme is the importance of gaining a better understanding of the role of reasoned scrutiny in individual and social choice, allowing a broad informational base. Within this, the material is split into three sections. A relatively brisk section relates to the years 1960-1970, whisking past choice of techniques and growth theory to give brief witness to a powerful rescue of social choice theory, meeting Nero and the impossible Paretian Liberal. The next section introduces the Rational Fool, taking Sen’s discussion of values and reasons extending beyond self-interest as illustrative of and central to his critique of standard modelling of choice behaviour. The last and longest section has Sen pummelling Bentham and (more politely) Rawls as he builds up the case for addressing a great variety of issues from the alternative perspective of capabilities. With economic development seen as the expansion of capabilities, in the sense of freedom to choose the life one has reason to value, it becomes evident that in the development of Sen’s thought, the ‘foundational disputes’ that caught his teenage eye have never been far away.

[1] J. Gay Meeks (*) Senior Research Associate, Centre of Development Studies,University of Cambridge, UKe-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_47
[2] Also drawing on his ‘Conversation’ with Klamer (1989). Unattributed quotations in this Introductioncome from that autobiographical note (Sen 1998).
[3] Noting ‘quite a drop’ in sophistication in the economics taught, a ‘common sense’ approach beingfavoured (Sen in Klamer 1989: 137).
[4] Robinson slammed this as ‘ethical rubbish’; Sraffa was ‘skeptical in a friendly way’; and Dobb, thoughfirst arousing Sen’s interest in the problem and helpful in discussion of it, still ‘did not share [the] enthusiasm’. Robertson, seen as ‘the natural heir’ to Marshall, thought the area ‘sensible’ but was firmly weddedto a traditional cardinal utility approach (from Sen in Klamer 1989: 138-140). Sen acknowledgesRobertson as important to him in scepticism about the behaviourism of revealed preference—perhaps hemay also have been significant in exemplifying a memorably witty way of writing? See Robertson (1952).
[5] Initial ideas were presented at Columbia in 1984 (see Sen 1985a), concluding ones at Stanford in 2008;the work was done in both Harvard and Cambridge (Sen 2009: xxi).
[6] First on democracy, then on India in the global world—see his books (not covered in this chapter), TheArgumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Sen 2005a), Identity and Violence:The Illusion of Destiny (Sen 2006a), An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Dreze and Sen2013), and his introductory essay (‘Violence and Civil Society’) to the Report of the CommonwealthCommission he chaired on Respect and Understanding (published in Peace and Democratic Society (Sen2011a)).
[7] As well as Bangladesh.
[8] Martins’s The Cambridge Revival in Political Economy (Martins 2013)—springing from a lecture byHarcourt on ‘The Cambridge Tradition’—links Sen’s economic thinking to Cambridge roots, drawing onthe connections with Dobb, Sraffa, and Gramsci (on which see also Sen 2009: 119-122), while Boianovsky(2014) explores links with Robertson. Sen acknowledges these influences as significant, but the presentchapter—whose theme might invite a Cambridge economics over-possessiveness of Sen’s work as awhole—is concerned to allow also for his stress on the crucial role of influences from elsewhere.
[9] In this ‘influenced.. .by Sraffa.. .and Broad.. .encouraged by.. .Dobb and.. .Robertson’ (Sen 2009: xxi).
[10] In Economics until recently, now in Development Studies: I am grateful to many graduate studentsfrom both for highly stimulating discussions of Sen’s ideas.