Francois Hollande honours Amartya Sen with the Legion d’Honneur in New Delhi in 2013 ©Swarup/Rex/Shutterstock

Amartya Sen is an eminently reasonable man. Over six decades as an economist and political theorist—he won the Nobel Prize in 1998—the 83-year-old has kept faith with rational thinking. This is as much to do with personal experience as intellectual preference. As a boy growing up in Bengal, Sen saw a bleeding labourer stumble into his garden. He was a Muslim who had been stabbed by Hindus. “Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing,” Sen wrote in his Identity and Violence (2006). It provoked revulsion, but also consideration. Through his career, even while working on emotive subjects like famine, poverty, justice and inequality, he has maintained a calm equilibrium.

When I spoke to him in London about the emotions unleashed by Donald Trump, Sen put things in perspective. “There is nothing new or extraordinary in his rejection of  reason,” he said, in the Bengali accent that western universities have never drummed out of him. “Even the French Revolution, which was so enormously well-backed by reason, led to a reign of terror.” One victim was the philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet, whose theories influenced Sen’s work on social choice. Under threat from the Revolutionary regime, Condorcet committed suicide in 1794.

The US president keenly targets his enemies—if only via Twitter. “He has managed to unleash a kind of thinking which drew more on prejudice than on cool reasoning,” said Sen, with magnificent understatement. “And I would apply this to Brexit,” he continued, “where some of the sentiments of hatred of foreigners came into the story in a big way.” He quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Without  it, democracy can be “taken over by forces that play up other things, especially hatred of particular communities.”

YOU'VE HIT THE LIMIT

You have now reached your limit of 3 free articles in the last 30 days.
But don't worry! You can get another 7 articles absolutely free, simply by entering your email address in the box below.

When you register we'll also send you a free e-book—Writing with punch—which includes some of the finest writing from our archive of 22 years. And we'll also send you a weekly newsletter with the best new ideas in politics and philosophy of culture, which you can of course unsubscribe from at any time

Email

Prospect may process your personal information for our legitimate business purposes, to provide you with our newsletter, subscription offers and other relevant information.

Click to learn more about these interests and how we use your data. You will be able to object to this processing on the next page and in all our communications.