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A review by rotorguy64
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen
2.0
I had high expectations of this book when I first heard of it. Amartya Sen has some serious academic achievements, he's regarded as one of the worlds leading experts on famines, and the book had high ambitions. The Idea of Justice, not even Rothbard could've come up with a more powerful and impressive name for a book. Understandably, I expected a philosophical treatise on, well, the idea of justice. Boy, was I in for a ride. I really wanted to like this book, if not as something that I could agree with, then as something that would at least challenge my libertarian views. Within a few pages, I realized how wrong I was.
Let me first say something about the style of the book. Its trains of thought are the opposite of stringent. The author keeps referring the reader back to earlier chapters where he (supposedly) already tackled a question, all the time. It was also filled with redundancies. These two things don't go along well. When you refer me to an earlier chapter after I read something that sounded like that earlier chapter, I feel cheated. Reading 400 pages isn't fun when they all sound the fucking same. I've read books that developed out of stand-alone essays that had more of a red string running through them.
The worst thing about his style, though, is how extremely imprecise and relativistic his writing is. I'm used to libertarian philosophers. They tend to give you definite ideas that you can easily grasp, incorporate into your worldview, cricitize and modify. Sen gives you suggestions on how things might be and shares his thoughts on what he believes could be important, hidden behind a layer of pretentious academic phrases. There is nothing definite to grasp or to criticize, and that makes reading the book tiresome. I had no sense of reward, no moment were I felt like everything was coming together.
That brings me to his philosophy. You'd expect there to be a lot of that in a book with 400 pages, but no, it doesn't go beyond giving these vague suggestions and unpolished thoughts. At one point, Sen mentions three systems of ethics that have different ideas on how to allocate resources, namely marxism, libertarianism and utilitarianism. He notices that they are in conflict with each other, says that this conflict cannot be decided in favor of one ideology and calls it a day. I think he did that to illustrate how complex questions of justice are. Why, of course they are complex to the point of not being solvable when you outright refuse to remove the clutter and the bullshit surrounding them! The book goes on like that, making statements that it instantly relativizes, and telling the reader about aspects that have to be considered alongside other conflicting aspects. That's the equivalent of "be yourself" and "listen to your heart", except worse.
To summarize, on a philosophical level, the book fails. The only things I gained from it were the niti-nyaya-distinction and the word "transcendental institutionalism" and its counterpart, as well as some admittedly very interesting thoughts on environmentalism, but in a book as long as this one, a few decent ideas only make the difference between two stars and one star.
Now, Sen is also an economist. In fact, that's his primary occupation. So you'd expect him to share some of his economic ideas, right? Wrong. Check out the footnotes for that, sucker! Sen could've dealt with different government programs in this book and detailed which ones are more effective, but he never did that.
Another beef I have with this book is that despite supposedly dealing with justice, it really only deals with social justice. General welfare and equality are not justice, they are general welfare and equality. Granted, they are related to the question of how goods should be distributed, which is a question also related to justice, so dealing with both makes sense, and mixing them together is understandable. However, not only does The Idea of Justice not deal exclusively with justice, it doesn't really deal with it at all aside from the question of distributing scarce goods. No mention at all of the criminal system, for example. Why does a book about justice not deal with justice? I blame the modern Zeitgeist. Justice is not in. Justice rapes consequentialism, pragmatism and relativism hard if you allow it to, and then what are you left with? Nothing that supports tyranny and social engineering, that's for sure, and the planners that run academics and politics can't have that.
The Idea of Justice only gets two stars from me because of the few decent (sometimes genuinely good) passages inside it, and because one star is reserved to books that I find outright disgusting, depraved, vile and worthless. The Idea of Justice is far from meeting these terms, but I still can't recommend or even like it.
Let me first say something about the style of the book. Its trains of thought are the opposite of stringent. The author keeps referring the reader back to earlier chapters where he (supposedly) already tackled a question, all the time. It was also filled with redundancies. These two things don't go along well. When you refer me to an earlier chapter after I read something that sounded like that earlier chapter, I feel cheated. Reading 400 pages isn't fun when they all sound the fucking same. I've read books that developed out of stand-alone essays that had more of a red string running through them.
The worst thing about his style, though, is how extremely imprecise and relativistic his writing is. I'm used to libertarian philosophers. They tend to give you definite ideas that you can easily grasp, incorporate into your worldview, cricitize and modify. Sen gives you suggestions on how things might be and shares his thoughts on what he believes could be important, hidden behind a layer of pretentious academic phrases. There is nothing definite to grasp or to criticize, and that makes reading the book tiresome. I had no sense of reward, no moment were I felt like everything was coming together.
That brings me to his philosophy. You'd expect there to be a lot of that in a book with 400 pages, but no, it doesn't go beyond giving these vague suggestions and unpolished thoughts. At one point, Sen mentions three systems of ethics that have different ideas on how to allocate resources, namely marxism, libertarianism and utilitarianism. He notices that they are in conflict with each other, says that this conflict cannot be decided in favor of one ideology and calls it a day. I think he did that to illustrate how complex questions of justice are. Why, of course they are complex to the point of not being solvable when you outright refuse to remove the clutter and the bullshit surrounding them! The book goes on like that, making statements that it instantly relativizes, and telling the reader about aspects that have to be considered alongside other conflicting aspects. That's the equivalent of "be yourself" and "listen to your heart", except worse.
To summarize, on a philosophical level, the book fails. The only things I gained from it were the niti-nyaya-distinction and the word "transcendental institutionalism" and its counterpart, as well as some admittedly very interesting thoughts on environmentalism, but in a book as long as this one, a few decent ideas only make the difference between two stars and one star.
Now, Sen is also an economist. In fact, that's his primary occupation. So you'd expect him to share some of his economic ideas, right? Wrong. Check out the footnotes for that, sucker! Sen could've dealt with different government programs in this book and detailed which ones are more effective, but he never did that.
Another beef I have with this book is that despite supposedly dealing with justice, it really only deals with social justice. General welfare and equality are not justice, they are general welfare and equality. Granted, they are related to the question of how goods should be distributed, which is a question also related to justice, so dealing with both makes sense, and mixing them together is understandable. However, not only does The Idea of Justice not deal exclusively with justice, it doesn't really deal with it at all aside from the question of distributing scarce goods. No mention at all of the criminal system, for example. Why does a book about justice not deal with justice? I blame the modern Zeitgeist. Justice is not in. Justice rapes consequentialism, pragmatism and relativism hard if you allow it to, and then what are you left with? Nothing that supports tyranny and social engineering, that's for sure, and the planners that run academics and politics can't have that.
The Idea of Justice only gets two stars from me because of the few decent (sometimes genuinely good) passages inside it, and because one star is reserved to books that I find outright disgusting, depraved, vile and worthless. The Idea of Justice is far from meeting these terms, but I still can't recommend or even like it.