IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cpo/journl/y2013i64p157-196.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An analysis of Rawls’s and Sen’s concepts of freedom

Author

Listed:
  • Herrade Igersheim

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the concepts of freedom used by John Rawls and Amartya Sen in the light of two well-known pairs of freedom: the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns defined by Constant and the pair negative freedom/positive freedom defined by Berlin. After a reminder of the seminal texts of both pairs, we will show that even if Rawls’s justice as fairness is mainly based on the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns, it deals as well with the effectivity of basic freedoms and so with the pair negative freedom/ positive freedom. Similarly, Sen’s works which are principaly focused on the pair negative freedom/positive freedom have close ties with the pair freedom of the ancients/freedom of the moderns – especially in his lastest works which stress the importance of democracy. Finally, this analysis will allow us to investigate Sen’s recent dichotomy between the trascendental and the comparative traditions.

Suggested Citation

  • Herrade Igersheim, 2013. "An analysis of Rawls’s and Sen’s concepts of freedom," Cahiers d’économie politique / Papers in Political Economy, L'Harmattan, issue 64, pages 157-196.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpo:journl:y:2013:i:64:p:157-196
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-d-economie-politique.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    freedom; Constant; Berlin; Rawls; Sen;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B21 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Microeconomics
    • B4 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpo:journl:y:2013:i:64:p:157-196. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carlos Andrés Vasco Correa (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.cahiersdecopo.fr/fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.