Amartya Sen is one of the world's leading public intellectuals. He is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books include Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005) and The Idea of Justice (2010). They have been translated into more than 30 languages.
The first edition in 1970 of this fine book was of immense importance and at the core of Amartya Sen's Nobel Prize. His contributions since, to our conceptions of rights, liberty, justice, identity, poverty, inequality and development, have been of still greater significance to our understanding of the fundamental challenges we face as individuals and societies in thinking about who we are and how we should act. The substantive and profound additions in this edition delve even deeper into the arguments of the original and relate them to the central questions and issues of his subsequent research and writing. Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We owe him a huge debt -- Nicholas Stern Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice and welfare economics. He is a leading figure in development economics, carrying out path-breaking work on appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries -- Anthony B. Atkinson * New York Review of Books * With his masterly prose, ease of erudition and ironic humour, Sen is one of the few great world intellectuals on whom we may rely to make sense out of our existential confusion -- Nadime Gordimer