Amartya Sen’s Hopes and Fears for Indian Democracy
“The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes,” Amartya Sen says.Photographs by Tony Luong for The New Yorker
Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, philosopher, and public intellectual, lives on a quiet street in Cambridge, just around the corner from Harvard Square. His home, which he shares with his wife, the historian Emma Rothschild, is spacious but cluttered, with old newspapers and magazines lying about and copies of Sen’s books on crowded tables. There are also photos of Ted Turner and Kofi Annan; framed paintings of the philosophers John Rawls and W. V. O. Quine, hanging in the living room, which were done by Rawls’s wife; and a photo of the poet Rabindranath Tagore in the entryway, which serves as a reminder that Sen is often mentioned alongside him as one of Bengal’s favorite sons.
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