Amartya Sen
A philosopher and economist who preaches tolerance to a divided world
By Lord Meghnad Desai
In his most recent book Identity and Violence, amartya Sen describes himself as: an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, a Hindu with a nonreligious lifestyle, a non-Brahmin, and a nonbeliever in an afterlife.
Amartya Sen, previously the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and now a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, is also the first Indian, indeed Asian, to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Yet what makes him unique is none of these things. Sen is special because he is the first economist-philosopher whose work has consciously touched the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world. His Poverty and Famines has changed the way famines are understood and cured. His idea is simple: people die during famines not because there is no food available but because they do not have the incomes to buy the food. Create incomes for the starving and the food will appear in the shops. His most widely read book Development as Freedom shows why development alone will guarantee economic and social freedoms as well as political and civil liberties. We are either all free, or none of us are.
Sen, at the age of 73, has now turned his fertile mind to the most urgent problem of the post-9/11 world: intolerance. He has celebrated public debates and dissent as vital to a democratic life in The Argumentative Indian. Now he has extended the argument globally. In tackling terrorism, we are in real danger of demonizing certain identities—being a Muslim, for example—which diminishes the person so labeled as well as those doing the labeling. Sen argues that the notion of a clash between civilizations is the disease rather than the diagnosis of our current troubles. He has deployed his erudition to show why neither the West nor the East has a monopoly on wisdom or tolerance, but are symbiotically interdependent. In Identity and Violence, he shows how while Giordano Bruno was being burned at the stake by the Inquisition in the 16th century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar held multifaith symposiums at his court. He has also pointed out that words such as algebra and algorithm have Arabic origins, and that the classics of Greek philosophy were preserved for Europe by Islamic scholars.
Amartya Sen is not just an Indian or Asian, not just an economist or philosopher. He is a truly global man, cosmopolitan in his sympathies, and universal in his concern for all.
Meghnad Desai, a member of Britain's House of Lords, is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics
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April 28, 2003 |
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October 11, 2004 |
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October 10, 2005 |
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