Reading Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice

It’s been a while since I’ve given an academic book a slow and careful read, taking notes along the way. Too often in recent years I’ve found myself quickly skimming books looking for the parts particularly relevant to work I was doing or for specific information I wanted to get from them. Now that I have this blog, I think it might be an interesting experiment to try reading a book and blogging about it as I work my way through it. The other day I picked up Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and I think this might be a good book for me to try this with.

Sen is a Noble Prize winning economist, who has had a long and distinguished career. Born in India when it was still under colonial rule, he is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. There’s really no point in me detailing his career here, though, since you can read all about it on Wikipedia. He’s also wrote a short autobiography that’s available online at www.nobelprize.org.

In The Idea of Justice Sen is addressing a lot of the issues that I’ve been thinking about in a variety of contexts since my days as a graduate student. Sen seems largely to be writing in response to John Rawls, to whom he has dedicated this book. While there is much that is open to criticism in Rawls’ work, his A Theory of Justice remains the state of the art in liberal political thought and while liberal political theory is not as trendy as other stuff being written these days, it continues in my mind to be the most relevant.

I know that some of the few readers of this blog come to it because they’ve had the misfortune of having me as their Lincoln-Douglas debate coach. Those readers of this blog know that “justice” is probably the most commonly used “value premise” offered in Lincoln-Douglas debate, and as I read through Sen’s book I’ll make a point of highlighting anything that I think might be particularly helpful for a debater. Another debate related aspect of Sen’s book is his discussion of the role of “public reason” in making societies less unjust. I have for some time now wondered whether Rawls’s notion of “public reason” could serve as a paradigm for understanding the value of debate.

My plan is to read The Idea of Justice chapter by chapter, starting with the Preface, and write a blog entry about each one without at any point reading ahead. I am curious to see how my thought about this book will unfold as he works his way through. This book isn’t, as so many academic books are these days, just a collection of essays that were written for different purposes and then patched together into a book.