I have just come across the lecture of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen talking about Power, Justice and Capabilities at the annual lecture of the Demos think tank a few days ago. This is the Demos blurb of it:

For the Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen, a good society is one populated by individuals with the capability to choose and construct good lives. His political philosophy, recently synthesised in his bookThe Idea of Justice is based on the need for each citizen to have broad enough set of ‘capabilities’ to be ‘responsible for their own wellbeing’. Sen defines a capability as ‘the power to do something’ and in this lecture he will examine how ideas of justice relate to ideas of power, capability and democracy.

At a time when confidence in many of the institutions of economic and political life has been ebbing, Sen will argue for a people-focused, rather than an institutionalist view of democracy and power. As he writes: “The working of democratic institutions, like that of all other institutions, depends on the activities of human agents.”

I am a big fan of web videos of lectures as this is an unrivalled way to accumulate knowledge without having to travel the world all the time. I’ll post them if I come across something I think is of wider interest.