The Uses of Sen
From Soundings:
The Uses of Sen
by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford
A review of The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen, Penguin 2009
Download a copy here > > >
Unlike many of his fellow economists Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has been sailing through the economic storm and the paradigmatic failures of liberal market capitalism with flags flying. At first sight his philosophy looks sound and his methodology intact. The technocratic and political elite who built careers on the mantra ‘there is no alternative' flounder through the intellectual wreckage in a bid to climb aboard his boat. Gordon Brown has claimed that, ‘Sen ... inspired many of the policies I pursued at the treasury'.
If Brown is unconvincing, others in New Labour have been liberally quoting Sen. Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury and in charge of public service reform, describes The Idea of Justice as ‘magnificent'. In a speech in September 2009 to Demos he said, ‘Sen makes the case that the greatest goal in politics is to try and equip people in society with a range of capabilities to live a life that one has reason to value'. To this end government must ‘look at the "arc of support" that most people need to get on and up in life and become more socially mobile'. Byrne argues that Britain needs a new civic ethos, to become a country of powerful people defined by a new partnership between the individual and the state.
Byrne's rhetoric belongs to what Stuart White, in a recent New Statesman article, calls ‘Centre Republicanism' (www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/09/societyguiding-progressive). Its intellectual home is Demos, and one of its better known ideological champions is the former government minister James Purnell. Purnell has been citing Sen's ideas for a number of years, and in the October 2009 issue of Prospect magazine he sets out the case for a Labour Party governed by the politics of liberal republicanism: ‘Politicians should try talking about freedom and power: the freedom to choose our way of life, and the power to achieve it. And they should listen to Sen's emphasis on the role of democracy as a form of public discussion.
These three ideas - freedom, power and democracy - are a starting point for renewal of the centre left'. The problem with this strategy, as we argued in our review of the Demos publication The Liberal Republic, which argues the same basic position, is that it remains essentially individualist (see Soundings 42, summer 2009). The attraction of Sen for ‘centre republicans' is that he allows them to take account of some of the restrictions under which so many individuals live their lives, without going so far as to acknowledge that it is structural inequalities that are causing their problems. The recent financial collapse has effectively destroyed the old New Labour project of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Purnell sets out a philosophical position for its revival. This might seem academic, as the country prepares itself for a Conservative government; but, whatever the outcome of the forthcoming election, the Crash of 2008 has set in train longer-term political realignments on both the left and the right. New Labour's strategy of triangulation has failed, but the left have yet to articulate a strategy that might prevail over the efforts of those who seek to renew it. Renascence will not achieved by a quick sprint to an election. It will require a long struggle to shape a new ideological formation, build alliances and create collective political agencies. At the same time the dominant ideology will attempt to repair itself and adjust to the new political and economic terrain. The aim of centre republicans is to re-establish a centre ground within a reconstituted dominant
ideology of liberal market capitalism. Its opponents in this task are not so much the Conservative Party, where the ideological differences with the leadership are not so great, but a resurgent, centre-left communitarian politics, both within the Labour Party and reaching beyond it, that seeks the longer-term transformation of the dominant ideology. In the lead-up to the next election and in the months following it, this conflict of values and politics will shape a new settlement within progressive politics.
In this struggle over the future of the left Sen has become a critical figure, because his work lies along the faultline defining the philosophical and political differences within progressive politics: communitarianism vs liberalism, egalitarianism vs market choice, class vs individualism, human well-being vs meritocratic aspiration, to name a few. For centre republicans, Sen overcomes these binary divisions and consigns them to the ideological past. But this approach requires a refusal to recognise the contradictions and ambiguities that lie at the epistemological heart of his work. Despite his apparent buoyancy, Sen's methodology struggles to match these changing times. He himself has pointed out the ways in which interpretation of Adam Smith's writing has been an ideological battlefield; the same observation can be made of his own work.
Remoralising political economy
The Idea of Justice gathers up a lifetime of thinking and wrestling with his critics. It is a testament to the acuity of Sen's intellect and to his moral integrity. It stakes a claim as the pre-eminent work in the field of moral and political philosophy by supplanting the dominance of John Rawl's 1971 Theory of Justice. It defines Rawls's limitations - ‘why should we regard hunger, starvation and medical neglect to be invariably less important than the violation of any kind of personal liberty?' And it takes theoretical thinking about the meaning of justice in a new direction. Alongside this task, and enabling its progress, is Sen's abiding commitment to Adam Smith, and his quest to save him from the dead hand of the neoliberals, who wrongly defined him as the apologist of ‘economic man', the champion of the self interest of the butcher, brewer and baker. Sen presents, instead, the great moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In the course of his task of reappropriating a modern-day icon, and rehabilitating overlooked aspects of his work, Sen sets out to redefine the moral and political narratives of liberal market capitalism. Sen is not a rebel; he works from the inside. He is a man of the establishment, born into a scholarly family of the East Bengal landowning class, and with an academic career spanning many of the major US and UK universities. His literary references are canonical, and he is a passionate advocate of the European Enlightenment. Public reasoning is the ‘enterprise of morality', and the hope and duty of humankind. But Sen is also attuned to the needs of the global poor. He is an advocate of feminism and committed to the practice of ethics. He breaks convention by drawing on resources such as the Bhagavadgita and the moral dilemma of Arjuna as an integral part of his argument. He recognises that the European Enlightenment was more than a singular embrace of instrumental rationality; rather, it represents a diversity of sometimes contrary views about the relationship between the emotions and the intellect.
The significance of Sen is that the trajectory of his unorthodox establishment scholarship has collided with the current multiple crisis - the disaster of American imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the crisis of political representation in many rich countries, the global rise of China and India, the self destruction of anglo-saxon capitalism and the consequent demolition of the intellectual capital of its technocratic elites; he is seen as a bearer of new resources for the philosophical recovery of liberal democracy and market capitalism. The good man Sen arrives with his repair kit. Sen describes Rawls's methodological approach as ‘transcendental', based on the abstract ideal of ‘just institutions' whose proper functioning depends upon people's compliance to them. Justice exists as a perfect but unattainable state. In contrast to this ‘transcendentalism', Sen grounds his idea of justice in ‘the lives that people are able to lead'. Achieving a perfect state of justice is impossible. What is needed is a theory that asks the question ‘how would justice be advanced?' He calls this the ‘comparative approach'. It does not aspire to perfectly just institutions, but challenges injustices wherever they exist, be it slavery, the subjugation of women or the lack of universal health care. Sen traces this approach back to an eclectic mix of thinkers - Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill (he regards Rawls's forebears as Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant).
He argues that the thinkers he draws on were all involved in comparisons of societies that ‘already existed or could feasibly emerge, rather than confining their analyses to transcendental searches for a perfectly just society'. He describes the distance between his ‘realization-focused' approach and Rawl's ‘transcendental institutionalism' as ‘quite momentous'. This distance is a consequence of two departures that Sen makes from ‘transcendental' thinking: the development of a realisation-based understanding of justice which focuses on human experiences and accomplishments, and the introduction of democratic deliberation into a theory of justice.
The concern of a realisation-based understanding of justice is with how people manage or don't manage to live their lives. The things a person manages to do or to be in the process of leading a life are ‘functionings'. Justice is related to an individual's capabilities or ‘substantive freedoms' in being able to realise these functionings. These would include such things as having good health, having
enough food to eat, being able to participate in the political process, having an education. In Development as Freedom (OUP 1999) he writes: ‘poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as lowness of income'.
People who suffer frequent sickness, deprivation and exclusion are deprived of the vitality to freely make choices. His introduction of democratic deliberation into a theory of justice is connected to his comparative approach, which requires the making of agreement ‘based on public reasoning, on rankings of alternatives that can be realized' (p17). And in order to incorporate public reasoning into his framework of thinking, he employs ‘Social Choice Theory'. It is here in particular that we start to see more clearly some of the problems in Sen's approach for a socially orientated left.
Social Choice Theory was pioneered by eighteenth-century French mathematicians, who were trying to develop a reasoned construction of the social order. It was revived in its modern form by the neo-classical economist Kenneth Arrow, who set out his mathematical theory of group decision-making in ‘A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare' (The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 58, No. 4, 1950). Arrow's aim was to devise a theory that would construct a procedure for passing from a set of known individual tastes to a pattern of social decision making. He begins by making the assertion that: ‘In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make "political" decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make "economic decisions".' He acknowledges some of the well-known objections to this ‘thin' version of decision-making - for example that social decisions are sometimes made by small groups, or through the influence of a ‘widely encompassing set of traditional rules' - only to dismiss them. Arrow's work, produced at the RAND Corporation, is a classic Cold War text, rooted in the capitalist ideology of individualism. It discounts any exploration of collective cultures of decision making. It fails to acknowledge the cultural context within which meaning is constructed. It does not explore the relational and dialogical nature of communication, or the inter-subjectivity of individuals. Social experiences and occurrences are accounted for in terms of what individuals think, choose and do. Arrow's individuals and their actions are mathematical constructs that do not achieve any meaningful relationship with one another. Sen's conception of public reasoning is indebted to Arrow's Social Choice Theory. But he responds to critics who question the validity of his methodological individualism by declaring that they are mistaken: ‘Uses of the capability approach have been quite unequivocal in not assuming any kind of a detached view of ndividuals from the society around them' (p245). He quotes Marx, who, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, criticises the German United Workers Party for reducing people to the singular category of ‘worker': ‘What is to be avoided above all is the re-establishing of "Society" as an abstraction vis-a-vis the individual'. He recognises that Marx's theories of the relationship between individual and society are much more complex that is usually acknowledged, but deploys this recognition in defence of a methodology that is a long way from comprehending that complexity.
Sen goes on to argue that there is no a priori reason why group capabilities - for example ‘the military strength of the American nation or game playing ability of the Chinese' - should not be a part of the discourse on justice. The reason for not including them, he explains, is that groups do not reason in the way individuals do. ‘Ultimately it is individual valuation on which we would have to draw, while recognizing the profound interdependence of the valuations of individuals who interact with each other' (p246). It is undoubtedly true that Sen's concept of the individual is more connected to context than is traditional in liberal theory, but the way in which he counterposes groups to individuals suggests that he does not fully grasp the purport behind the criticism that is levelled at him. What was at stake for Marx was the historical and structural ‘overdetermination' of the individual. Sen does not address this problematic. The Idea of Justice remains moored in a neoclassical tradition that views individuals as ahistorical, self-enclosed rationalisers. Sen is sufficiently aware of this to ensure that his model of the individual is not a maximum utility-seeker, governed solely by instrumental rationality, a mere cipher of economic self interest. But he cannot escape this legacy. Though his individuals interact together, it is an idealised model of interaction, and at its centre remains Arrow's two-dimensional version of the individual. For example Sen understands the importance of emotions, but he treats them as if they are an addendum to reasoning rather than its foundation: in his model feelings follow after words rather than words out of feeling. Individuals exist in relationships, but relationships do not exist within the individual. Yet a range of disciplines - sociology, psychoanalysis, epigenetics, complexity theory and neuroscience - show us the limitations of this approach for understanding human nature and interdependency. In Sen's idealised model of human interaction, history is silent, and the dynamics of class, oppression, and their corollaries of shame and hate are absent.
Equality or not
In his 1979 lecture ‘Equality of What?' Sen describes his capabilities approach as a natural extension of Rawls's concern with the primary goods of income and wealth: it shifts attention from goods to what goods do to people. Human needs can be interpreted in the form of basic capabilities which are often implicit in the demand for equality. He proposes the idea of a ‘basic capability equality'. Thirty years later, in The Idea of Justice, Sen describes his difference from Rawls as a ‘serious departure from concentrating on the means of living to the actual opportunities of living' (p233).
Justice is related to whether or not individuals have the capabilities that enable them to choose how to live. ‘In assessing our lives, we have reason to be interested not only in the kind of lives we manage to lead, but also in the freedom that we actually have to choose between different styles and ways of living' (p227). He draws on Aristotle to introduce the idea of what living a good life means: ‘Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else' (p253). He continues: ‘the means of satisfactory living are not themselves the ends of good living' and cannot be measured as such (p254). This shift in tone is accompanied by his equivocation over the place of equality in his idea of justice. Sen asks: ‘If equality is important, and capability is indeed a central feature of human life, would it not be right to presume that we should demand equality of capability?' (p295). His answer is no - because capabilities are characteristics of individual advantages, and justice and moral and political evaluation cannot be concerned only with the overall opportunities and advantages of individuals in society (p297). But Sen is in a dilemma about where the emphasis on the development of human capabilities belongs. Should it lie with the individual, or with the structures that determine the conditions of human existence? The traditions of liberal market capitalism tell him to stay focused on the self-defining individual; the theorist in him tells him to pay attention to the determining structures.
On page 297 his prose - which is not easy in its more lucid passages - twists and turns as he struggles to reach some kind of resolution. He takes a series of faltering steps: ‘The subject of fair process and a fair deal goes beyond individuals' overall advantages into other - especially procedural - concerns, and these concerns cannot be adequately addressed through concentrating only on capabilities.' Equally, there cannot be a unifocal view of equality - the multiple dimensions in which equality matters are not reducible to one space only. On the other hand, ‘there can be other demands on distributional judgements, which may not be best seen as demands for equal overall freedom for different people'. He then moves on to discuss just rewards for work: there is ‘a line of reasoning that gives an important status to efforts and the rewards which should be associated with labour'. But this line of reasoning yields ‘normative ideas of exploitation'.
Furthermore: ‘The literature on the exploitation of sweated labour and the unjust rewards received by those who do the "real work" has a strong connection with this perspective'. This tortuous sequence of abstract evaluations fades away with a note listing a number of Marxist texts on the subject. The ethical value of equality exposes the foundational weakness in Sen's work: the inability of liberal individualism and market capitalism to realise the equal worth of all.
In order to sustain its internal logic Sen's idea of public reasoning must be untouched by popular politics. The Idea of Justice floats above history, class, economic power, the violence and corruption of ruling classes, the fear, anger and shame of the marginalised. Collective political action, trade unions, political parties appear to have no part to play. In Sen's world there are no corporate enemies of justice, democracy and equality to undermine or purchase the outcomes of public reasoning. His abstractions disguise his ambivalences and evasions. He avoids politics because it threatens to pull them apart. One consequence is that his work is open to elastic interpretation.
James Purnell in his Prospect article writes: ‘Amartya Sen thinks politicians would be right to shy away from Rawls's theories, as they do not sufficiently reward effort - something most people deem morally important'. Sen does not say this about politicians, and in the sequence on equality described above his concern with effort is not about meritocracy as Purnell suggests. It is concerned with the just rewards of the labouring classes in relation to the concept of exploitation. Nevertheless an ambiguity exists for Purnell to use. The late Jerry Cohen accused Sen of espousing an inappropriate ‘athletic' image of the individual, which ‘overestimates the place of freedom and activity in well-being' - echoing Foucault's critique of neoliberal governance and its reification of an entrepreneurial way of life. Purnell's particular appropriation has been a constant in the way centre republicans have used Sen. In a lecture on ‘The Aspiration Society' to the Fabian Society in 2007, Purnell, then Minister of Work and Pensions, aligns Sen with his own view that ‘those who try harder, who make more of their talents, deserve a consequence - a reward'. He then states that Sen's capabilities approach requires that responsibility ‘needs to be required, not just encouraged'. He conscripts Sen into New Labour's welfare reform programme as if it were the concrete realisation of his theory of capabilities. Is it a coincidence that people claiming the new Employment and Support Allowance claimants must take the Work Capability Assessment? Sen emerges out of the neo-classical liberal tradition - which he has humanized and made to accommodate a more developed view of human being. But his unwillingness to break with it creates a number of ambiguities in his work, particularly around the meaning of equality and his idealised use of public reasoning. His opacity allows him to be used by those seeking to retrench the dominant ideology. For all its humanity, and Sen's complex thought and moral decency, The Idea of Justice is at risk of being a manual for a discredited political elite of state lever-pullers who want a return to business as usual.
Jon Cruddas is MP for Dagenham.
Jonathan Rutherford is editor of Soundings.