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What’s Yours Is Mine

Roger Bland: Who Owns Antiquities?, 6 November 2008

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage 
by James Cuno.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.95, June 2008, 978 0 691 13712 4
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... of dealing with this evidence, Cuno tries to justify his position by quoting Edward Said and Amartya Sen on the complex nature of national identity. Cuno discusses two countries, Turkey and China, in chapters combining genuinely interesting information with self-indulgent asides. It’s puzzling that he doesn’t mention recent cases in which the ...

Who Lives and Who Dies

Paul Farmer: Who survives?, 5 February 2015

... malnutrition and stunting. In An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen consider the plight of hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in poverty, often as a consequence of class, caste and gender inequality, without ready access to education, credit or any sort of social safety net.3 One of the questions ...

Cloudy Horizon

Stephen Sedley: Constitutional Business, 13 April 2023

Against Constitutionalism 
by Martin Loughlin.
Harvard, 258 pp., £34.95, May 2022, 978 0 674 26802 9
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... as an ideal may well have the strengths, such as public reason, memorably ascribed to it by Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice (2009), but as Sen recognises, considerably more is needed to make it flameproof. It would be naive to ignore the vulnerability of an organic constitution such as the UK’s to capture or ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... Wayne Booth; among philosophers, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell; among social scientists, Amartya Sen. Nussbaum explains her discovery of virtues eloquently, volubly, in the manner of a belated Victorian moralist. The reverse of a dry writer, she is fairly often deeply moved, and you come to know not only what she felt but how and when the ...

The Wrong Way Round

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 17 September 1987

Rival Views of Market Society, and Other Recent Essays 
by Albert Hirschman.
Viking, 197 pp., £18.95, November 1986, 0 670 81319 2
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Development, Democracy and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honour of Albert Hirschman 
edited by Alejandro Foxley, Michael McPherson and Guillermo O’Donnell.
Notre Dame, 379 pp., $25.95, October 1986, 0 268 00859 0
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... the other, which is why, as they did in Argentina, tyrants try to stop it. Alessandro Pizzorno and Amartya Sen extend the idea and its connection to individual and collective identities.) But for the unheroic, as Hirschman adds, there are dangers in too much public passion. Ten years ago, in a book on The Passions and the Interests, on the ‘political ...

Third Natures

Christopher Minkowski: The Kāmasūtra, 21 June 2018

Redeeming the ‘Kamasutra’ 
by Wendy Doniger.
Oxford, 181 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 0 19 049928 0
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... were killed. Others hoped it meant voters did value India’s open society after all, what Amartya Sen has called the ‘broad idea of a large India proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present’, rather than ‘a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism’. With developments in India and the US in ...

Diary

Megan Vaughan: Vampires in Malawi, 20 March 2003

... its own people,’ said President Muluzi. ‘That’s thuggery.’ In Poverty and Famine (1981), Amartya Sen argues that because democratically elected governments are held accountable by a free press and the threat of elections, they do not allow their people to starve (though they may allow them to go hungry). The scandal of mass starvation is ...

She says nothing

Gavin Jacobson: Rohingyas, 1 December 2016

The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide 
by Azeem Ibrahim.
Hurst, 235 pp., £12.99, May 2016, 978 1 84904 623 7
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The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Freedom 
by Peter Popham.
Rider, 440 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 1 84604 371 0
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... threat of deportation, or not being registered at all, which meant internment in a refugee camp. Amartya Sen has called the situation in Rakhine a ‘slow genocide’, while the Early Warning Project named Myanmar as the state where genocide was most likely to take place. The tensions in Rakhine, as well as civil war in northern Kachin and the eastern ...

Hyenas, Institutions and God

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 20 July 1995

The Construction of Social Reality 
by John Searle.
Allen Lane, 241 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 7139 9112 7
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... as in the presently popular models of ‘rational choice’ (models of rational foolishness, as Amartya Sen has described them), or reflected on in the course of practical reasoning, they are, most will insist, the ends of individuals. It’s only individuals that can have intentions. Most philosophers, Searle concedes, have thought ‘that anybody who ...

The Rule of the Road

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: What is an empire?, 12 February 2009

After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empire 
by John Darwin.
Penguin, 592 pp., £10.99, March 2008, 978 0 14 101022 9
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... nationalists have transformed the Mughals into an object of hatred, many others – including Amartya Sen – view their empire as a near utopian political arrangement. Empire here stands for diversity, tolerance and difference, as distinct from the nation-state with its inherent drive towards homogeneity. On the other hand, to many ...

Don’t join a union, pop a pill

Katrina Forrester: ‘The Happiness Industry’, 22 October 2015

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing 
by William Davies.
Verso, 314 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 78168 845 8
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... which acknowledges that humans are not only or not always self-interested utility-maximisers (Amartya Sen described homo economicus as a ‘rational fool’), but social, moral and emotional animals too; studies of economic ‘irrationality’ now proliferate. Experts and the market are no longer seen to be alternatives as collectors of data. We are ...

What about Bert?

Jeremy Waldron: Equality, 9 August 2001

Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality 
by Ronald Dworkin.
Harvard, 511 pp., £23.95, June 2000, 0 674 00219 9
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... of equality. Following themes presented in seminars he taught jointly at Oxford with the economist Amartya Sen, Dworkin insisted that we should focus our attention on the question, ‘Equality of what?’ What (exactly) should an egalitarian try to equalise – or, more realistically, which inequalities should he try to mitigate? A society might aim to ...

Happiness and Joe Higgins

Brian Barry, 20 October 1983

Explaining Technical Change: A Case-Study in the Philosophy of Science 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £22.50, June 1983, 0 521 27072 3
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Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge, 177 pp., £17.50, June 1983, 9780521252300
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... to me below par, because Elster tries to do too much in it. It was originally written to appear in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams’s book on Utilitarianism, and in accordance with this, its accounced object is to argue that the phenomenon of adaptive preferences discredits Utilitarianism as a moral theory. But this means that there are really two ...

Gloomy Pageant

Jeremy Harding: Britain Comma Now, 31 July 2014

Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now 
by David Marquand.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 1 84614 672 5
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... the contestable and the contingent’ in their search for a ‘beautiful, timeless precision’. Amartya Sen is another, if only for his insistence that the best guarantee of democracy is a long, continuous process of ‘public reasoning’ that Marquand can’t find anywhere right now. The opposition is thinner on the ground but formidable. Hayek is ...

Dear Prudence

Steven Shapin: Stephen Toulmin, 14 January 2002

Return to Reason 
by Stephen Toulmin.
Harvard, 243 pp., £16.95, June 2001, 0 674 00495 7
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... preferred alternatives include Santa Fe Institute complexity and chaos theory, the economics of Amartya Sen and Brian Arthur’s ‘path-dependency’, social-science-as-if-people-mattered, holistic biology and an implausibly rosy picture of contemporary bioethics and its role in American clinical medicine. Fair enough, even if Toulmin oscillates ...

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