Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
The Way to Reason
By Alan Ryan
Rationality and Freedom
by Amartya Sen
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 736 pp., $39.95
The history of economics is rich in economists of the first rank who were equally influential as philosophers, sociologists, and political thinkers: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich von Hayek are just four from very different times and of very different political allegiances. Amartya Sen is another. His contributions to the purest and most abstract realms of economic theory make him 'an economist's economist'—and were one reason for his Nobel Prize in economics in 1998. But he is universally known for his work on famines, economic development, the condition of women, and the problems of poverty, work that has earned him the admiration of everyone who works in the field of development. This was another element in his Nobel citation.
Review, 4651 words
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