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Creating capabilities: the human development approach

Creating Capabilities was meant to be ‘a small book for a general audience’ offered as an introduction to the Capabilities Approach, as Professor Nussbaum wrote in the acknowledgements. But the book achieves much more than this. By systematising important results developed in earlier works such as Cultivating Humanity (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1999), Women and Human Development (2000) and Frontiers of Justice (2006), to mention just a few, she provides not simply an introduction to a general audience but a new paradigm for the Human Development Approach. The book introduces new categories and important clarifications, such as those in Chapter 2, about internal and combined capabilities, the architectonic role of affiliation and practical reason capabilities and greater concern with the best intervention points for public policy. The approach followed in the book is quintessentially dynamic, representing people’s states in a fluid and evolving way. Chapter 3 follows a well-trodden discourse, preparing the ground for Chapter 4’s excellent summary of her position vis-à-vis Rawls’s, in particular, about her answer to ‘the problem of stability’, according to which mutual advantage is not the best basis for establishing the social contract, but altruism is, focusing on how helpful sentiments can be cultivated in a socially propitious way. Chapter 4 also showcases how Professor Nussbaum articulates Kantian and Aristotelian principles in an approach that makes normative commitments, arguing for a characterisation of a life with human dignity. Chapter 5 on cultural diversity should be read by anyone interested in understanding how Professor Nussbaum uses her list of central capabilities as a normative conception, relevant for thinking about traditional values and cultures and respect for choice. Chapter 6 extends this discussion to global justice and the respect for diversity and decentralised institutional solutions. In Chapter 7, as in Chapters 2 and 4, Professor Nussbaum tackles the roots of the capabilities approach, exploring its philosophical influences. Her investigation of Aristotle there is noteworthy although it does not replace her analysis developed in Love’s Knowledge (1990) that remains the best reference for understanding the influence of Aristotle on the capabilities approach. Her discussion of Adam Smith’s work, however, is unique, highlighting how habit and education play a decisive role in shaping human development. Her argument that ‘human dignity is a tender plant’ (p. 135) shapes the model proposed in the book for creating capabilities. Readers conversant with Professor Nussbaum’s work might at first underestimate the final chapter of the book, reading it simply as a compilation of results from some of her previous works. Her reference to Gender might be understood just as a return to Women and Human Development’s thesis. Her allusion to Cambridge Journal of Education Vol. 42, No. 3, September 2012, 441–443