Nobel Prize winner Professor Amartya Sen will discuss his latest book The Idea of Justice| with LSE's Professor Richard Sennett.
This major philosophical work by one of the world's leading public intellectuals constructs a new theory of justice, not from abstract ideals or notions of what perfect institutions and rules might be, but from what the results of a system are practically, in the world. It highlights the importance of public reasoning and argues that a system of justice should require the agreement not just of the community which is making laws, but of outsiders who might be affected, or who might have valuable perspectives to offer. The methods and conclusions of the book have implications for many different fields of intellectual activity, not only those connected with justice. It is the most ambitious and wide-ranging book Amartya Sen has yet written.

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard and an honorary fellow of LSE. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 1998-2004. His books include Development as Freedom (OUP), The Argumentative Indian (Allen Lane/Penguin) and Identity and Violence (Allen Lane/Penguin), and have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing Project, one of the first racially-mixed public housing projects in the United States. Professor Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work; he also taught occasionally at Harvard. In the mid 1990s Mr. Sennett began to divide his time between New York University and the London School of Economics. In addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University.

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