In an interview on Power and Ideas

Tell me about the unifying theme of your choices.

The unifying theme is the balance between power and ideas. You need both. If you have power without ideas you can hollow yourself out, be self-erasing, and if you’ve got ideas without power then the ideas become irrelevant. It is a betrayal really of the ideas themselves. You need a balance between the two.

Who has that balance? Obama?

I would say Obama has that balance beautifully, and the inspirational thing about him is that he sticks to both his purpose and his strategy. He does seem to take damaging hits for the sake of his ideas. Amartya Sen also has that balance. He has ideas and he has his own picture of the world. One of his most compelling ideas is that no democratic country has ever had a famine. It’s one of those frame-changing findings.

The Idea of Justice is a magical book, not just because of the unbelievable depth and breadth of everything he’s read, but also because of his generosity of spirit. He argues with people at their absolute best, expressing their ideas often better than they had formed them themselves and then disagreeing with them in a way that makes them think: ‘I got that wrong pretty well, actually.’

The book’s central idea is the importance of what he calls capability but I would call power, and that it is not just about money. In the past, the centre left has got lost in the cul-de-sac of this definition of equality being about money. Sen’s example disproving that is that of a disabled person who will need more money because of his disability. Power is about the ability to make decisions and choices in your life, about capability.

He is brilliantly withering about democracy being a Western value, citing the example of Indian leaders Ashoka [304-232BC] and Akbar [1542-1605]. The ancient history of democracy, he says, has even deeper roots in India than in Greece. This is about democracy as discussion as much as democracy at election. He uses that example to talk about world democracy. There is not going to be global democracy of government for a long time, but we’ve already got democracy of discussion with the internet, NGOs.

Who is Sen arguing with?

[20th-century American philosopher] John Rawls, mainly, with whom he taught a course at Harvard and to whom the book is dedicated. Sen thinks that American egalitarian liberalism was important in starting the debate but that it has significant errors at its heart. The first is that Rawls believed that justice was about perfect institutions, but it’s not. It is more practical than that. It is about how you can achieve a better world. You don’t need to know what the perfect world would be like in order to choose between alternatives. The second is the point I have already made, which is that justice is not about resources but about capability, power. There is the Hobbesian theory of political philosophy that is contractarian [that civil society is based on a contract between state and citizen] and there is the Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill theory that is comparative – you compare two moral options. Sen believes that this is superior to Hobbesian theory.

In an interview on Children and the Millennium Development Goals

Your final choice is The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen.

Professor Amartya Sen is a giant in development and a giant in economics and philosophy, winning the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998. The brilliance of the book is that it deals in general with the whole question of inequality in countries in different situations.

Professor Sen has a very subtle mind and is a brilliant economist and philosopher. He does not over-simplify the complexity of issues of judging inequality and taking action. He deals with the views of the late Harvard philosopher Rawls who argued that you can’t take action on inequality in any particular situation unless you have a vision of what perfect equality would mean in the world. And that, of course, is almost always a recipe for being unable to do anything about inequality because it is so difficult.

Yet without underplaying the difficulties, Amartya Sen reaches step by logical step the liberating conclusion that, even though we may never be able to define perfect equality, you can get democratic agreement on extremes of inequality for which there is a need for some sort of action. So what I like when I think about children and the Millennium Development Goals is that in this book we have the most robust defence of action along the lines of the Millennium Development Goals or along the lines of tackling the unnecessary deaths of millions of children in the world. These are examples of extremes of inequality in the world today which governments have decided are unacceptable. Sen has provided in this book the economic and philosophical justification for these and other actions proposed in the other four books I have selected.