IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v29y2005i6p1145-1170.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The concept of freedom and its relation to economic development--a critical appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen

Author

Listed:
  • Renee Prendergast

Abstract

Following a brief review of the conception of freedom as employed in economic discourse, this paper focuses on the evolution of the concept of freedom in the work of Amartya Sen. It traces the development of Sen's thought from the capability analysis of the late 1970s to his more recent separation of freedom into its opportunity and process aspects. While broadly appreciative of Sen's development of the concept of positive freedom, the paper identifies some difficulties arising from his definition of capability as a set of options as well as from his separation of the opportunity and process aspects of freedom. Aspects of the relationship between Sen's conception of freedom and that of Marx are discussed briefly in the context of Sen's recent discussion of the market as a source of freedom. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Renee Prendergast, 2005. "The concept of freedom and its relation to economic development--a critical appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 29(6), pages 1145-1170, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:29:y:2005:i:6:p:1145-1170
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bei081
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hatice Karaçay Çakmak, 2010. "Can the Capability Approach be Evaluated within the Frame of Mainstream Economics? A Methodological Analysis," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 57(1), pages 85-99, March.
    2. Heinicke, Philipp, 2010. "The evolution of the capability approach or Sen's quest for an informational base," Wittener Diskussionspapiere zu alten und neuen Fragen der Wirtschaftswissenschaft 6/2010, Witten/Herdecke University, Faculty of Management and Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:29:y:2005:i:6:p:1145-1170. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.