In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet
William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That
slaves howe'er contented, never know. Sen explains how in a world of
unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in
rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not
technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain
imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social
deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main
purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to
the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the
ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient
means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets,
political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute
to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained
by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all
closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant
analytical framework. By asking "What is the relation between our
collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we
would like?" and by incorporating individual freedom as a social
commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again, as it did
in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual
well-being and freedom.
