From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Idea of Justice.
We live in a world of deep deprivations. Close to a billion people worldwide live in poverty, and many more lack access to healthcare and education. Millions lose their lives and liberty each year to political violence and persecution. Against this bleak backdrop, Amartya Sen asks: How can we better understand and secure human rights? He argues that the foundation of human rights lies not in the goodwill of governments or the survival of enlightened institutions, but something far more powerful and enduring: our ability to reason.
Described by New Statesman as \"the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent public intellectual,\" Sen offers a reason-based analysis to mend a broken world, exploring the \"cement of humanity\" that so attracted David Hume. He demonstrates that securing human rights requires new arguments and sometimes radical departures – broadening our view of freedom, accommodating incompleteness in moral judgments, and mapping the complex relations between facts and values.
Full of Sen’s characteristic acuity, The Cement of Humanity is both philosophically rigorous and bracingly practical.
Amartya Sen is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence (2007), The Idea of Justice (2010), and Home in the World (2021). They have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Sen has served as the President of the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, the International Economic Association, and the Econometric Society. He is a recipient of India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, and a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur in France. He is also the recipient of the National Humanities Medal of the United States, awarded by President Obama.
