On a sweltering late June day in Cambridge I first encounter Amartya Sen, as
Peter O’Toole first encountered Omar Sharif, except in reverse. As I enter
the gate of Trinity and screw my eyes up against the sun’s reflection from
the unsheltered expanse of the Great Court, I can make out, on the far side,
what may be a man, standing alone. As I get closer he becomes definitely a
man, closer still and he has Senlike characteristics, closer yet and he
seems to be holding something and speaking to himself, almost there and he
waves. It is the Nobel laureate and former Master of Trinity, simultaneously
greeting me and making one of his many arrangements on his mobile phone.
There is another, better, metaphor for being with Sen, but it isn’t mine. In a
wonderfully generous interview his first wife, the Indian writer and
academic, Nabaneeta Dev, described how, when the young economist and
philosopher wooed her in the mid-1950s, “she felt like a dwarf who was being
approached by the Moon”.
Sen is one of the great thinkers of our era, and his writings range from
discursive and luminous interventions on great modern questions, such as
identity and famine, to major complex works on political philosophy. At a
moment when many are wondering whether there couldn’t be a better world than
that preceding the credit crunch, and better lives to be led, Sen is
publishing what his publishers describe as his “most ambitious” book, The
Idea of Justice, an attempt to construct a new way of understanding what a
more just world might be like.
The phone call over, we shake hands, and make our way to the Great Hall
(everything is Great in Trinity) for lunch at High Table under the high
rafters, with Henry VIII as permanent dinner monitor. Sen — a slightly
stooping figure at 75, but spry and smart with it — points out the place,
far down the hall above the lunching undergraduates, where his own portrait
hangs. Somehow we are talking about Prospect magazine’s poll of top
intellectuals a few years ago. “Chomsky came in first, of course,” says Sen,
“I think we came in about tenth.” I look it up later; he was eighth.
He probably should have been first. If a public intellectual is defined by his
or her capacity to bridge the worlds of pure ideas and the most far-reaching
policies, Sen has few rivals. His publications going back to the Sixties,
including Development as Freedom, show an engagement in the great
international economic questions of our era: world poverty, famine, welfare
and the condition of women. It was for his contribution to welfare economics
that he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, at about the time he
began his six-year tenure as Master of the college where now we sit.
Sen’s interventions are not of that particular de haut en bas kind, where he
descends from higher contemplation to deliver himself of vituperations on
the state of politicians or lamentations on the deficiencies of popular
culture. The current event that pricks his interest is not MPs’ expenses but
Iran, as he leans over to ask an Iranian colleague what he thinks the
reformist Mr Rafsanjani — whose wife was arrested during the Tehran troubles
— will do now. Sen is happier — and safer — in matters of grand policy,
where his observations that, say, no famine has yet taken place in a
properly functioning democracy, or his shocking calculation in 1990 that up
to 100 million women had “gone missing” in South and West Asia and in China,
either through selective sex abortion or as a result of discriminatory
health provision.
As he unfolds aspects of his life before me, I realise just how intricate it
is. His family existence, for example, has been immensely complicated by
death, divorce and oceans. He was born in Bengal in 1933. He courted his
Indian first wife in Cambridge, and they had two daughters, but separated in
the early 1970s and she now lives in India. He lived with his second wife,
Eva Colorni, in London while commuting to Oxford, and later, a single parent
after her early death from cancer in 1985, took their two young children to
America, where both still live. Six years later, he married Emma Rothschild,
academic scion of that renowned family. Sen divides his time between Boston
and Britain, with regular visits to India, as well as fairly constant
travels to other parts of the globe.
Our discussions are punctuated by phone calls that require him to consult a
small month-to-a-page diary in which tiny appointments are scrawled at all
angles in red and black ink.
At last we are settled. It is evident that Sen is not one of that breed of
academic-polemicists which is becoming so prevalent, nor does he like to be
reduced to soundbites. His most emphatic statement comes when discussing
Adam Smith, who he has enjoyed from his early undergraduate days in
Calcutta. “I can still remember,” Sen smiles, “feeling an absolute sense of
ecstasy in first reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments.”
Since the Enlightenment there have been, he says, essentially two main ways of
looking at the creation of a just society. One, originating with Hobbes, is
the tradition of the social contract — the vesting of ideal justice in ideal
institutions. It is associated with Locke, Rousseau, Kant and, latterly,
“the greatest moral philosopher of our times”, as Sen describes the late
John Rawls, as well as the extant Ronald Dworkin.
There is a “huge gap” between that and the other approach attributed by Sen to
Adam Smith, Condorcet, “in his own way to Jeremy Bentham”, John Stuart Mill,
Marx and Mary Wollstonecraft. This approach “is not concerned with the issue
as to what would the ideal just society look like but with how can you
remove what people could see quite clearly as injustice in the world”. Mill,
he says, didn’t think that abolishing slavery or addressing the subjugation
of women would lead to the perfect society “about which people would never
agree, but that it was worth trying to see what kind of reasoned agreement
we could get”. And, says Sen, “We have the same problem today as in the 18th
century. Not slavery, but issues such as child under-nourishment, people
dying of illnesses for which cures are known and medicine could be produced
cheaply — all kinds of ways in which the world remains clearly improvable in
terms of justice.” In Sen’s view it is this more pragmatic tradition in
Enlightement moral philosophy that has been neglected in recent times. This
is Sen’s side.
Not that he’ll be rude about anyone on the other team. I suggest to him that
the Dworkin view is, in practical terms, rather arid. “Dworkin is not arid,”
Sen says. “He is anything but. I taught classes with him for ten years and
throughly enjoyed it.”
But if there are two sides, there are also sides within sides. A substantial
section of the Idea of Justice is taken up with refuting the conclusions of
increasingly influential left-of-centre economists who, while
non-institutionalists, have what Sen sees as a limited view of human needs.
Overtly he takes on the ideas expounded by Professor Richard Layard in works
such as Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and implicitly rejects the
reductionism shown by those such as Professor Richard Wilkinson who see
income inequality as the foundation of injustice.
Sen is charming about it. “Richard Layard is a very close friend of mine. I
want to emphasise that because I am quite critical of his aproach. In fact I
stayed in his basement when I was on my own in London. But I do think that
by concentrating on all Bentham and no Mill, he does make a mistake. Freedom
has many dimensions that are not captured in the pleasure statistics. We are
not pleasure machines.”
The problem with “happiness” as sole measure is that you may think yourself
happy, but in fact be stymied. You may indeed adjust to your deprivation, as
some slaves might have been “happier” on the plantation than free in the
difficult outside world. In his book, Sen instances the contrast between the
Indian states of Kerala and Bihar. In Kerala morbidity is lower but concerns
about morbidity are higher. Ideas and education that help to reduce
morbidity in Kerala make the population more aware of it, so ignorance is
bliss of a kind.
And the notion of income inequality being per se almost the sole measure of
justice is problematic too. “These statistics have all kinds of impurities.
If you’re asked how happy are you, the answer is exactly informative as to
what you would say if somebody asked you how happy you are. It doesn’t tell
anyone whether you’re really happy or not. People can get very discontented
when they’re very successful. And the sad thing is that people actually do
adjust if they’re very deprived. I spent 15 years working on famine and it’s
amazing how happy famine victims are when they ultimately get a meal. But
that doesn’t mean people are generally more deprived than a famine victim
having a first meal.”
Sen’s revolutionary idea is that of capability, the capacity that people have
for living and choosing how to live a good life. A good idea of justice
concerns enhancing capability. “Take deprived women in a very gender-unequal
society. They have less right to go to school and less interest in their
wellbeing. One of the early works I did was connected with the Bombay
Hospital, where the hospital statistics suggested that the girls were much
more ill than the boys, because they were brought into the hospital only
when they were more ill than the boys were, and that was because there was
much more concern with the boys’ health. Sometimes you even, as a girl, get
persuaded that it’s a natural arrangement, it has always gone on.”
“Interestingly the only book on which John Stuart Mill’s publisher lost money
was The Subjugation of Women. So capability in this instance is about what
can the woman do and how does it compare with what access the man has to
things such as food and education. Getting immediate medical attention would
be another, being treated with respect when you express a view is another,
being permitted to climb to a higher position where it is merited is
another. In all these ways you spot deprivation in actual capability, in
what you can do and what you can be.”
The connection between ideas and life as it is lived can often seem tenuous.
But listening to Sen I am impressed by his clarity and feel that his is an
idea of justice that could easily find favour with the best of the young
activists across the political spectrum.
On the way out through the gates of Trinity I ask Sen if he would describe
himself as a feminist. He tells a story of how, after one of his articles
about women’s rights was published he received a letter addressed to “Ms
Amartya Sen. It was written by a woman and concluded, ‘They will never
understand us!” The unconscious implication, of course, is that Amartya Sen
does understand. I think this is good news.
Amartya Sen gives the Southbank Centre Lecture at the London Literature
Festival, July 13, followed by a conversation with Jon Snow; on July 23 the
ICA lecture, followed by a conversation with John Gray; on July 27 the LSE
lecture. He will be in conversation with Julian Baggini at the Bristol
Festival of Ideas, July 29
