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It is impossible to evaluate Sen’s thought in terms of pure economics, because his humanism takes his thought into other domains, including philosophy, political theory, sociology and demography.
Born in 1933 into a Hindu academic family in Dhaka, before it became the capital of Bangladesh, he studied at the universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, before teaching in Indian and American Universities, and then at Oxford, before returning to Cambridge on being elected Master of Trinity College. This factual curriculum vitae gives little indication of his taking, from the beginning, a standpoint by which he was perfectly at home in all these settings, creative and judicious in every sphere he entered. In his considerable list of puuheauons, some or modest iength, others originally papers or lectures being quite short, and in innumerable articles, one is conscious of a mind which searches out the roots of questions and their interconnections, expressing them in limpid English prose. Sensitive, though not always formally so, to the philosophical dimensions of the material, the resultant thought has a sapiential quality, in which it approximates, for example, to that of the late Belgium Louvain economist, Fernand Baudhuin. One thinks especially of the latter’s Déontologie des Affaires (Louvain 1960). The latter’s range was primarily Western Europe, with extensions mainly into more Eastern Europe and the United States; Sen’s range is world-wide, equally at home in the problems of developing India, of famine-struck Africa, as with those of Western Europe, North America and Asia. He often uses the human factors which accompany the rise of the post-war Japanese economy as a yard-stick to measure the problems of the aging economies of the older industrialised nations.
