The Capability Approach: an Open Access TextbookPlus

So, folks, here it is, my book on the capability approach that has been in the works for a very long time. I’m very happy that it is finally published, I am happy that you can download the PDF for free at the publisher’s website, and that the paperback version is also about half the price of what a book with a university press would cost (and a fraction of the price it would cost if published by one of the supercommercial academic presses whose names shall not be mentioned here).

I am not going to sell you my book – in a literal sense there is no need to sell you anything since you can download the book (as a PDF) for free from Open Books Publishers’ website (and I have no material interest in selling you hardcopies since I will not receive any royalties). And in a non-literal sense I should not sell this book either, since it is not up to me to judge the quality of the book. So I’ll only make three meta-comments.

First, this book doesn’t quite fit the regular genres. It is not a textbook in the traditional sense of that word – surveilling and explaining the literature and adding some structure and comments. Instead, the book starts with presenting a generalisation of the capability approach. It gives the reader an answer to the question “What the heck is this thing that people call ‘the capability approach’?” I offer a ‘model’ that gives us the structure of the capability approach, which I call the modular view. In a nutshell, the capability approach can be seen as a framework consisting of a combination of three types of modules: the A-module which consists of core properties that each capability theory/application should have, the B-modules in which each capability theory needs to make some choices but there are various choices possible (example: the purpose for which one uses the capability approach), and the C-modules, which may or may not be relevant depending on the purpose of one’s capability theory/application (example: choice of measurement techniques). In the book, I give a list of what I believe the properties in Module A, and the various B-modules and C-modules of the capability approach are.

This modular view is a new way of understanding the capability literature, and if it works the way I hope it will work, then it should help scholars from a wide range of fields to see better how they can use the capability approach for their own purposes. This modular view of the capability approach is new, and if it is convincing, it also has implications for existing work in the literature (for example, some claims made by some (eminent) capability scholars are not true if my view is right). On the other hand, the second half of the book can be read as a “frequently asked questions” on the capability approach. Is it a liberal approach? Is it too individualistic? How does it relate to human rights theories? What impact could it have on welfare economics? Is it the same as the human development paradigm that has been championed by the UNDP? Clearly, providing answers to these questions has a strong explanatory flavour – so in that sense it does have a textbook character. Perhaps we could categorise this book as a TextbookPlus. Or perhaps a word exists for this type of books that I do not know?

Second, I have been surprised, when writing the book, how much the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of the literature on the capability approach has played a role in the clarifications that are needed in this literature. Scholars and students from different disciplines are often not properly understanding eachother, and at several moments when writing the book I felt like I was the middle-woman between the philosophers/political theorists and the social scientists (including economists), trying to explain to each party how the other party uses certain terminology and why they have certain scholarly concerns. I did not intend to take on this role when I started writing the book – it just had to happen.

Finally, I really care about covers (Harry knows since I’ve often told him how much I like the cover of his book ‘On Education‘). For most academic books, the cover is the main place of aesthetic freedom and expression. The cover of my book is a picture of a piece woven by my oldest son Aaron (a few years ago). In my view, it perfectly fits as a symbol for what the capability approach stands for – stressing the multidimensional nature of human wellbeing and freedoms, as well as the many ways in which different dimensions (functionings) can be put together to form something that is bigger than the elements taken separately. Just imagine one of those colours being taken out: it would look quite different. The same is true if we leave out essential dimensions when evaluating human lives and thinking about how to organise societies, which is what much work in the capability approach is concerned with.