Review of Sen's Identity and Violence

Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment. As an economist Sen has been hugely influential, helping found the new discipline of social choice theory and winning the Nobel prize for economic sciences in 1998. Through his seminal studies of famine and his theory of freedom as a positive condition involving the full exercise of human capabilities, he has done more to criticise standard models of economic development than any other living thinker. In his new book he writes more as a liberal philosopher than as an economist. Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the "solitarist" theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group. Sen believes this solitarist fallacy shapes much communitarian and multicultural thinking, as well as Samuel Huntingdon's theory of "clashing civilisations". In each case it involves the fallacy of defining the multiple and shifting identities present in every human being in terms of a single, unchanging essence. In Sen's view the idea that we can be divided up in this way leads to a "miniaturisation" of humanity, with everyone locked up in tight little boxes from which they emerge only to attack one another.