Amartya Sen,winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. The following essay is based on a keynote address that he delivered at a February 1999 conference in New Delhi on “Building a Worldwide Movement for Democracy,” cosponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi). This essay draws on work more fully presented in his book Development as Freedom, to be published by Alfred Knopf later this year.
In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. The European empires, especially the…
Drawn from outstanding articles published in the Journal of Democracy, The Global Divergence of Democracies follows the enthusiastically received earlier volume, The Global Resurgence of Democracy.
With such influential contributors as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Putnam, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Anwar Ibrahim, this is an indispensable resource for students of democracy and instructors at the undergraduate and graduate levels.