Academic

Legal Theory Bookworm

By Lawrence Solum

The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach by Martha C. Nussbaum. Here is a description:

If a country?s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world?s billions of individuals are really managing?

In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?

The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how?by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy?we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

And from the reviews:

A remarkably lucid and scintillating account of the the human development approach seen from the perspective of one of its major architects.
--Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics

Nussbaum, who has done more than anyone to develop the authoritative and ground-breaking capabilities approach, offers a major restatement that will be required reading for all those interested in economic development that truly enhances how people live.
--Henry Richardson, Georgetown University

A marvelous achievement: beautifully written and accessible. With Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum is one of the founders of the 'capability approach' to justice; the most innovative and influential development in political philosophy since the work of John Rawls. This book, for the first time, puts in one place all the central elements of Nussbaum's systematic account of the approach, together with its sources and implications.
--Jonathan Wolff, University College London

The very best way to be introduced to the capability approach to international development. It is also a wonderfully lucid account of the origins, justification, structure, and practical implications of her version of this powerful approach to ethically-based change in poor and rich countries.
--David Alan Crocker, The University of Maryland School of Public Policy

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 12, 2011 (boomark / email).