Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach

I recommend everyone read this book! Nussbaum, indebted to Aristotle, provides a solution to the problems of globalization that allows an individual to flourish, but do so in her own way--that is, she walks a very fine line between universalism (human flourishing) and relativism (respecting one's autonomy to pursue a particular way of life). Her theory has even been adopted by the United Nations Development Programme.

Nussbaum's book is excellent reading for those with little background in philosophy or economics. She explains her important ideas about the goals of development very clearly. The point of development is to permit people to achieve a fully human functioning. What she writes might strike many readers as, well, just common sense.But this is far from the case. Nussbaum's claim that the point of development is to help people achieve a fully human functioning is actually very foreign to most standard theories of economics and economic development. Readers with a good background in economics and/or philosophy will find her book quite impressive. In fact the more you know about the relevant subjects the more you can see how good, original, and important her ideas are. She adroitly deals with many of the flaws of standard economics to present a thoughtful alternative vision of what it means to be developed.She also addresses long-standing debates involving those for--and against--postmodernist thought. She sneaks this in so that it is easy for many readers to miss that she is doing this. Although she accepts many of the charges made by postmodernists against modernist thinking, she explicitly rejects the pure egoistic subjectivity offered by postmodernism. Stated crudely, what Nussbaum offers is a dignified vision of what humans should be without invoking God or "objective reality." Really good stuff. I've used this book for college undergraduates and many have praised this book highly and many had said they had their eyes opened to important issues they didn't think about before.

Those who have read Nussbaum's other books and essays on women, development and political theory will find here a carefully argued, contextually sensitive and principled approach to questions of global justice and human flourishing. Drawing on the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (source of "the capabilities approach") and her own Aristotelian social philosophy, Nussbaum takes a hard look at key debates about development, rejecting both free market fundamentalism and underexamined cultural relativism. Her universalist stance is controversial but courageous, a sincere effort to think through a political ethic in the wake of globalization. Not everyone will agree with Nussbaum, but she asks the right questions and lays out positions to be argued with.