Capabilities can be viewed as all states of being and doing available to a person. Functionings can be viewed as a person's states of being and doing, which include a broad range of individual actions and conditions that a person has reason to value: being healthy and avoiding premature mortality, among others. Sen's first major theme is that analysis of development should go beyond material progress to encompass concerns of social development and social justice, which he argues can be done by focusing on 'functionings' and 'capabilities' of individuals. Moreover, the reader's interest is sustained by frequent illustrations from classical writers of the universality of certain cultural values-notably, the value of individual freedom as a social good. Although readability occasionally lapses when the book discusses formal literature, the underlying deeply felt real-world concerns come through emphatically.

Thus, it strives for informal and nontechnical explanations of a vast technical and, at times, highly formal literature on social choice theory and its applications. The book, which evolved from a series of lectures Sen gave in the fall of 1996 when he was a Presidential Fellow at the World Bank, is intended for the general reader. At the same time, development should be seen as the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy, requiring, among other things, the removal of major sources of 'unfreedom,' including poverty, tyranny, poor economic opportunities, neglect of public facilities, and intolerance.

Development as Freedom draws together a lifetime of scholarship spanning the disciplines of ethics, economics, sociology, politics, demography, and moral philosophy into a grand synthesis: social choice underpinned by substantive freedoms of individuals promotes the development of economies and societies in their broadest sense. Knopf, New York, 1999, xvi + 366 pp., $27.50/Can$41.50 (cloth).Īmartya Sen's extensive writings on welfare economics, specifically on social choice, distribution, and poverty, constitute the analytical foundation and building blocks of this book.

Sen a 1999 development as freedom