Women and Human Development
Nussbaum's 2000 'Women and Human Development' — the capabilities approach applied to gender
Tradition: Capabilities approach (with Amartya Sen) / philosophical feminism / development ethics
Nussbaum's 2000 'Women and Human Development' — the capabilities approach as feminist development ethic
Published by Cambridge University Press in 2000, 'Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach' is Nussbaum's definitive presentation of the capabilities approach (developed jointly with Amartya Sen, who supplied the basic framework in his economic-philosophical work since the 1980s) as a normative framework for assessing human development, with special emphasis on the situation of women in developing countries. The book draws on Nussbaum's extensive fieldwork in India, where she had been working with women's-development organisations (particularly SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association in Gujarat) since the early 1990s. Nussbaum's distinctive contribution to the Sen-developed capabilities framework is a substantive list of ten central capabilities that, on her account, are necessary to any genuinely human life and ought to be constitutionally guaranteed in any decent society: (1) life; (2) bodily health; (3) bodily integrity; (4) senses, imagination, and thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) other species; (9) play; (10) political and material control over one's environment. The book is built around case studies of two Indian women (Vasanti and Jayamma) whose specific situations of patriarchal-economic deprivation illustrate the capabilities framework in practice. The book is the foundational presentation of the capabilities approach and a major contribution to development ethics, philosophical feminism, and political philosophy.
Author
Editions cited
- Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- Subsequent development: Frontiers of Justice (Belknap/Harvard, 2006); Creating Capabilities (Belknap/Harvard, 2011)
- Critical context: Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999); Severine Deneulin and Lila Shahani, An Introduction to the Human Development and Capability Approach (Earthscan, 2009)
School Embodiments
Definitive Nussbaumian statement of the capabilities approach.
"The ten central capabilities." (Women and Human Development, ch. 1)
Liberal-political framework — capabilities as constitutional guarantees.
"The capabilities approach is a form of political liberalism." (Women and Human Development, ch. 3)
Major normative-ethical theory.
"Capabilities, not utility, are the proper goal of development." (Women and Human Development, ch. 1)
Humanist-Aristotelian framework throughout.
"What it means to live a properly human life." (Women and Human Development, ch. 2)
Social-democratic capabilities framework.
Internal Tensions
Definitive presentation of the capabilities approach. Continuously cited in development ethics, philosophical feminism, and political philosophy; the basis for the UN Human Development Index reforms and for ongoing debates about whether economic-monetary measures of development are adequate to human flourishing.
I. Time
2000. Nussbaum was 53 and had been at the University of Chicago since 1995 (in joint appointments across the Law School, Philosophy, and Divinity).
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II. Space
Chicago (Nussbaum's institutional base) and India (the fieldwork sites). The geographical-political space of the book is the bridge between American philosophical theory and Indian-development practical work.
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III. Matter
Single philosophical-political monograph (~310 pages). Form is essay-monographic with case-study material — the two Indian women (Vasanti and Jayamma) recur across chapters as concrete points of reference.
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IV. Observer
Middle-to-late Nussbaum. The observer is the philosophical-political theorist whose fieldwork in India informs her theoretical framework — the case-study Indian women are not illustrations of the framework but partial-sources of it.
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V. Energy
Programmatic-political-philosophical energies. The book is the most concentrated single statement of the capabilities approach.
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VI. Information
Single book of seven main chapters. The ten-capabilities list (ch. 1) is the book's central informational structure.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Women and Human Development resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.