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Jean Drèze on why Amartya Sen is the original ‘argumentative Indian par excellence’

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‘Abstract as they may seem, his essential ideas are a springboard for public action’: Jean Drèze’s foreword to Lawrence Hamilton’s ‘How To Read Amartya Sen’.

Amartya Sen is better known as an economist than as a philosopher, but he is both and more, like Adam Smith – someone he admires and who happens to share his initials. It is, quite often, his grounding in philosophy that enables him to question the received ideas of economics and turn them around. He was already famous for his ability to put old issues on a new plane when I read some of his work for the first time in the early 1980s. Forty years later, Amartya Sen’s monumental work has exercised a profound influence on scholarship, policy and action in a wide range of fields.

This concise, lucid and lively book is an excellent introduction to Sen’s essential ideas. Before reading it, I had serious doubts whether anyone would ever have a sufficient command of Sen’s prolific writings for this purpose. Lawrence Hamilton’s book, of course, does not cover all aspects of Sen’s thinking. Large portions of it, in fact, are left out, explicitly or implicitly. But the book does a wonderful job of presenting and discussing the essential ideas that have informed most of Sen’s work.

Some readers may find the ideas discussed in this book a little abstract. This may seem to jar with the fact that Amartya Sen is known not only as a great mind but also as someone who is keen to bring about practical change in the world. Indeed, he is, ultimately, a man of action, even if his preferred tool of action is not climbing barricades or shooting petitions but public reasoning – “arguments for a better world”, to borrow the evocative title of a festschrift (edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur) published in his honour. Amartya Sen is the argumentative Indian par excellence. Abstract as they may seem, his essential ideas are, in fact, a springboard for public action.

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