阿瑪蒂亞·森：作為普世價值的民主（外文原版）

原標題：阿瑪蒂亞·森：作為普世價值的民主（外文原版）

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Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17

Democracy as a Universal Value

Amartya Sen

In the summer of 1997, I was asked by aleading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that hadhappened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusuallythought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened overthe last hundred years. The European empires, especially the British and Frenchones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. We witnessedtwo world wars. We saw the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism. The centurywitnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) orradical transformation (as in China). We also saw a shift from the economicdominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japanand East and Southeast Asia. Even though that region is going through somefinancial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify theshift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades(in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). The past hundredyears are not lacking in important events.

Nevertheless, among the great variety ofdevelopments that have occurred in the twentieth century, I did not,ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent developmentof the period: the rise of democracy. This is not to deny that otheroccurrences have [End Page 3]also been important, but I would arguethat in the distant future, when people look back at what happened in thiscentury, they will find it difficult not to accord primacy to the emergence ofdemocracy as the preeminently acceptable form of governance.

The idea of democracy originated, of course,in ancient Greece, more than two millennia ago. Piecemeal efforts atdemocratization were attempted elsewhere as well, including in India.1But it is really in ancient Greece that theidea of democracy took shape and was seriously put into practice (albeit on alimited scale), before it collapsed and was replaced by more authoritarian andasymmetric forms of government. There were no other kinds anywhere else.

Thereafter, democracy as we know it took along time to emerge. Its gradual--and ultimately triumphant--emergence as a workingsystem of governance was bolstered by many developments, from the signing ofthe Magna Carta in 1215, to the French and the American Revolutions in theeighteenth century, to the widening of the franchise in Europe and NorthAmerica in the nineteenth century. It was in the twentieth century, however,that the idea of democracy became established as the "normal" form ofgovernment to which any nation is entitled--whether in Europe, America, Asia,or Africa.

The idea of democracy as a universal commitmentis quite new, and it is quintessentially a product of the twentieth century.The rebels who forced restraint on the king of England through the Magna Cartasaw the need as an entirely local one. In contrast, the American fighters forindependence and the revolutionaries in France contributed greatly to anunderstanding of the need for democracy as a general system. Yet the focus oftheir practical demands remained quite local--confined, in effect, to the twosides of the North Atlantic, and founded on the special economic, social, andpolitical history of the region.

Throughout the nineteenth century, theoristsof democracy found it quite natural to discuss whether one country or anotherwas "fit for democracy." This thinking changed only in the twentiethcentury, with the recognition that the question itself was wrong: A countrydoes not

have to be deemed fit for democracy;rather, it has to become fit through democracy. This is indeed amomentous change, extending the potential reach of democracy to cover billionsof people, with their varying histories and cultures and disparate levels ofaffluence.

It was also in this century that peoplefinally accepted that "franchise for all adults" must mean all--notjust men but also women. When in January of this year I had the opportunity tomeet Ruth Dreyfuss, the president of Switzerland and a woman ofremarkable distinction, it gave me occasion to recollect that only a quartercentury ago Swiss women could not even vote. We have at last reached the pointof recognizing that the coverage of universality, like the quality of mercy, isnot strained. [End Page 4]

I do not deny that there are challenges todemocracy"s claim to universality. These challenges come in many shapes andforms--and from different directions. Indeed, that is part of the subject ofthis essay. I have to examine the claim of democracy as a universal value andthe disputes that surround that claim. Before I begin that exercise, however,it is necessary to grasp clearly the sense in which democracy has become adominant belief in the contemporary world.

In any age and social climate, there aresome sweeping beliefs that seem to command respect as a kind of generalrule--like a "default" setting in a computer program; they areconsidered right unless their claim is somehow precisely negated. Whiledemocracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, inthe general climate of world opinion, democratic governance has now achievedthe status of being taken to be generally right. The ball is very much in thecourt of those who want to rubbish democracy to provide justification for thatrejection.

This is a historic change from not very longago, when the advocates of democracy for Asia or Africa had to argue fordemocracy with their backs to the wall. While we still have reason enough todispute those who, implicitly or explicitly, reject the need for democracy, wemust also note clearly how the general climate of opinion has shifted from whatit was in previous centuries. We do not have to establish afresh, each time,whether such and such a country (South Africa, or Cambodia, or Chile) is"fit for democracy" (a question that was prominent in the discourseof the nineteenth century); we now take that for granted. This recognition ofdemocracy as a universally relevant system, which moves in the direction of itsacceptance as a universal value, is a major revolution in thinking, and one ofthe main contributions of the twentieth century. It is in this context that wehave to examine the question of democracy as a universal value.

The Indian Experience

How well has democracy worked? While no onereally questions the role of democracy in, say, the United States or Britain orFrance, it is still a matter of dispute for many of the poorer countries in theworld. This is not the occasion for a detailed examination of the historicalrecord, but I would argue that democracy has worked well enough.

India, of course, was one of the majorbattlegrounds of this debate. In denying Indians independence, the Britishexpressed anxiety over the Indians" ability to govern themselves. India wasindeed in some disarray in 1947, the year it became independent. It had anuntried government, an undigested partition, and unclear political alignments,combined with widespread communal violence and social disorder. It was hard tohave faith in the future of a united and democratic India. [End Page 5]And yet, half a century later, we find a democracy that has, taking the roughwith the smooth, worked remarkably well. Political differences have beenlargely tackled within the constitutional guidelines, and governments haverisen and fallen according to electoral and parliamentary rules. An ungainly,unlikely, inelegant combination of differences, India nonetheless survives andfunctions remarkably well as a political unit with a democratic system. Indeed,it is held together by its working democracy.

India has also survived the tremendouschallenge of dealing with a variety of major languages and a spectrum ofreligions. Religious and communal differences are, of course, vulnerable toexploitation by sectarian politicians, and have indeed been so used on severaloccasions (including in recent months), causing massive consternation in thecountry. Yet the fact that consternation greets sectarian violence and thatcondemnation of such violence comes from all sections of the country ultimatelyprovides the main democratic guarantee against the narrowly factional exploitationof sectarianism. This is, of course, essential for the survival and prosperityof a country as remarkably varied as India, which is home not only to a Hindumajority, but to the world"s third largest Muslim population, to millions ofChristians and Buddhists, and to most of the world"s Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains.

Democracy and Economic Development

It is often claimed that nondemocraticsystems are better at bringing about economic development. This beliefsometimes goes by the name of "the Lee hypothesis," due to itsadvocacy by Lee Kuan Yew, the leader and former president of Singapore. He iscertainly right that some disciplinarian states (such as South Korea, his ownSingapore, and postreform China) have had faster rates of economic growth than manyless authoritarian ones (including India, Jamaica, and Costa Rica). The"Lee hypothesis," however, is based on sporadic empiricism, drawingon very selective and limited information, rather than on any generalstatistical testing over the wide-ranging data that are available. A generalrelation of this kind cannot be established on the basis of very selectiveevidence. For example, we cannot really take the high economic growth ofSingapore or China as "definitive proof" that authoritarianism doesbetter in promoting economic growth, any more than we can draw the oppositeconclusion from the fact that Botswana, the country with the best record ofeconomic growth in Africa, indeed with one of the finest records of economicgrowth in the whole world, has been an oasis of democracy on that continentover the decades. We need more systematic empirical studies to sort out theclaims and counterclaims.

There is, in fact, no convincing generalevidence that authoritarian [End Page 6]governance and the suppressionof political and civil rights are really beneficial to economic development.Indeed, the general statistical picture does not permit any such induction.Systematic empirical studies (for example, by Robert Barro or by AdamPrzeworski) give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflictbetween political rights and economic performance.2The directional linkage seems to depend onmany other circumstances, and while some statistical investigations note aweakly negative relation, others find a strongly positive one. If all thecomparative studies are viewed together, the hypothesis that there is no clearrelation between economic growth and democracy in either directionremains extremely plausible. Since democracy and political liberty haveimportance in themselves, the case for them therefore remains untarnished.3

The question also involves a fundamentalissue of methods of economic research. We must not only look at statisticalconnections, but also examine and scrutinize the causal processes thatare involved in economic growth and development. The economic policies andcircumstances that led to the economic success of countries in East Asia are bynow reasonably well understood. While different empirical studies have variedin emphasis, there is by now broad consensus on a list of "helpfulpolicies" that includes openness to competition, the use of internationalmarkets, public provision of incentives for investment and export, a high levelof literacy and schooling, successful land reforms, and other socialopportunities that widen participation in the process of economic expansion. Thereis no reason at all to assume that any of these policies is inconsistent withgreater democracy and had to be forcibly sustained by the elements ofauthoritarianism that happened to be present in South Korea or Singapore orChina. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence to show that what is needed forgenerating faster economic growth is a friendlier economic climate rather thana harsher political system.

To complete this examination, we must gobeyond the narrow confines of economic growth and scrutinize the broaderdemands of economic development, including the need for economic and socialsecurity. In that context, we have to look at the connection between

political and civil rights, on the one hand,and the prevention of major economic disasters, on the other. Political andcivil rights give people the opportunity to draw attention forcefully togeneral needs and to demand appropriate public action. The response of agovernment to the acute suffering of its people often depends on the pressurethat is put on it. The exercise of political rights (such as voting,criticizing, protesting, and the like) can make a real difference to thepolitical incentives that operate on a government.

I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable factthat, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial faminehas ever occurred [End Page 7]in any independent and democratic countrywith a relatively free press.4We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look:the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; faminesin the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China"s 1958-61 famine with the failure ofthe Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India underalien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economicallythan India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largestrecorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famineof 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for threefull years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no oppositionparties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, itis precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policiesto continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can besaid about the world"s two contemporary famines, occurring right now in NorthKorea and Sudan.

Famines are often associated with what looklike natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity ofexplaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during thefailed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in NorthKorea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or evenworse ones, manage perfectly well, because a responsive government intervenesto help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are theindigent, deaths can be prevented by recreating incomes (for example, throughemployment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims.Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts orfloods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe andBotswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people withoutexperiencing a famine.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is aserious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections andcriticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help butmake such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have faminesunder British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I witnessedas a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappearedsuddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.

I have discussed these issues elsewhere,particularly in my joint work with Jean Dr"eze, so I will not dwell further onthem here.5Indeed, the issue of famine is only one example of the reach of democracy,though it is, in many ways, the easiest case to analyze. The positive role ofpolitical and civil rights applies to the prevention of economic and socialdisasters in general. When things go fine and everything is routinely good,this instrumental role of democracy may not be particularly missed. It is whenthings get fouled up, for one [End Page8] reason or another,that the political incentives provided by democratic governance acquiregreatpractical value.

There is, I believe, an important lessonhere. Many economic technocrats recommend the use of economic incentives (whichthe market system provides) while ignoring political incentives (whichdemocratic systems could guarantee). This is to opt for a deeply unbalanced setof ground rules. The protective power of democracy may not be missed much whena country is lucky enough to be facing no serious calamity, when everything isgoing quite smoothly. Yet the danger of insecurity, arising from changedeconomic or other circumstances, or from uncorrected mistakes of policy, canlurk behind what looks like a healthy state.

The recent problems of East and SoutheastAsia bring out, among other things, the penalties of undemocratic governance.This is so in two striking respects. First, the development of the financialcrisis in some of these economies (including South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia)has been closely linked to the lack of transparency in business, in particularthe lack of public participation in reviewing financial arrangements. Theabsence of an effective democratic forum has been central to this failing.Second, once the financial crisis led to a general economic recession, theprotective power of democracy--not unlike that which prevents famines indemocratic countries--was badly missed in a country like Indonesia. The newlydispossessed did not have the hearing they needed.

A fall in total gross national product of,say, 10 percent may not look like much if it follows in the wake of a growthrate of 5 or 10 percent every year over the past few decades, and yet thatdecline can decimate lives and create misery for millions if the burden ofcontraction is not widely shared but allowed to be heaped on those--theunemployed or the economically redundant--who can least bear it. The vulnerablein Indonesia may not have missed democracy when things went up and up, but thatlacuna kept their voice low and muffled as the unequally shared crisisdeveloped. The protective role of democracy is strongly missed when it is mostneeded.

The Functions of Democracy

I have so far allowed the agenda of thisessay to be determined by the critics of democracy, especially the economiccritics. I shall return to criticisms again, taking up the arguments of thecultural critics in particular, but the time has come for me to pursue furtherthe positive analysis of what democracy does and what may lie at the base ofits claim to be a universal value.

What exactly is democracy? We must notidentify democracy with majority rule. Democracy has complex demands, whichcertainly [End Page 9]include voting and respect for election results,but it also requires the protection of liberties and freedoms, respect forlegal entitlements, and the guaranteeing of free discussion and uncensoreddistribution of news and fair comment. Even elections can be deeply defectiveif they occur without the different sides getting an adequate opportunity topresent their respective cases, or without the electorate enjoying the freedomto obtain news and to consider the views of the competing protagonists.Democracy is a demanding system, and not just a mechanical condition (likemajority rule) taken in isolation.

Viewed in this light, the merits ofdemocracy and its claim as a universal value can be related to certain distinctvirtues that go with its unfettered practice. Indeed, we can distinguish threedifferent ways in which democracy enriches the lives of the citizens. First,political freedom is a part of human freedom in general, and exercising civiland political rights is a crucial part of good lives of individuals as socialbeings. Political and social participation has intrinsic value for humanlife and well-being. To be prevented from participation in the political lifeof the community is a major deprivation.

Second, as I have just discussed (indisputing the claim that democracy is in tension with economic development),democracy has an important instrumental value in enhancing the hearingthat people get in expressing and supporting their claims to politicalattention (including claims of economic needs). Third--and this is a point tobe explored further--the practice of democracy gives citizens an opportunity tolearn from one another, and helps society to form its values and priorities.Even the idea of "needs," including the understanding of"economic needs," requires public discussion and exchange ofinformation, views, and analyses. In this sense, democracy has constructiveimportance, in addition to its intrinsic value for the lives of the citizensand its instrumental importance in political decisions. The claims of democracyas a universal value have to take note of this diversity of considerations.

The conceptualization--evencomprehension--of what are to count as "needs," including"economic needs," may itself require the exercise of political andcivil rights. A proper

understanding of what economic needsare--their content and their force--may require discussion and exchange.Political and civil rights, especially those related to the guaranteeing ofopen discussion, debate, criticism, and dissent, are central to the process ofgenerating informed and considered choices. These processes are crucial to theformation of values and priorities, and we cannot, in general, take preferencesas given independently of public discussion, that is, irrespective of whetheropen interchange and debate are permitted or not.

In fact, the reach and effectiveness of opendialogue are often underestimated in assessing social and political problems.For example, [End Page 10]public discussion has an important role toplay in reducing the high rates of fertility that characterize many developingcountries. There is substantial evidence that the sharp decline in fertilityrates in India"s more literate states has been much influenced by publicdiscussion of the bad effects of high fertility rates on the community atlarge, and especially on the lives of young women. If the view has emerged in,say, the Indian state of Kerala or of Tamil Nadu that a happy family in themodern age is a small family, much discussion and debate have gone into theformation of these perspectives. Kerala now has a fertility rate of 1.7(similar to that of Britain and France, and well below China"s 1.9), and thishas been achieved with no coercion, but mainly through the emergence of newvalues--a process in which political and social dialogue has played a majorpart. Kerala"s high literacy rate (it ranks higher in literacy than anyprovince in China), especially among women, has greatly contributed to makingsuch social and political dialogue possible.

Miseries and deprivations can be of variouskinds, some more amenable to social remedies than others. The totality of thehuman predicament would be a gross basis for identifying our "needs."For example, there are many things that we might have good reason to value andthus could be taken as "needs" if they were feasible. We could evenwant immortality, as Maitreyee, that remarkable inquiring mind in the Upanishads,famously did in her 3000-year old conversation with Yajnvalkya. But we do notsee immortality as a "need" because it is clearly unfeasible. Ourconception of needs relates to our ideas of the preventable nature of somedeprivations and to our understanding of what can be done about them. In theformation of understandings and beliefs about feasibility (particularly, socialfeasibility), public discussions play a crucial role. Political rights,including freedom of expression and discussion, are not only pivotal ininducing social responses to economic needs, they are also central to theconceptualization of economic needs themselves.

Universality of Values

If the above analysis is correct, thendemocracy"s claim to be valuable does not rest on just one particular merit.There is a plurality of virtues here, including, first, the intrinsicimportance of political participation and freedom in human life; second, the instrumentalimportance of political incentives in keeping governments responsible andaccountable; and third, the constructive role of democracy in theformation of values and in the understanding of needs, rights, andduties. In the light of this diagnosis, we may now address the motivatingquestion of this essay, namely the case for seeing democracy as a universalvalue. [End Page 11]

In disputing this claim, it is sometimesargued that not everyone agrees on the decisive importance of democracy, particularlywhen it competes with other desirable things for our attention and loyalty.This is indeed so, and there is no unanimity here. This lack of unanimity isseen by some as sufficient evidence that democracy is not a universal value.

Clearly, we must begin by dealing with amethodological question: What is a universal value? For a value to beconsidered universal, must it have the consent of everyone? If that were indeednecessary, then the category of universal values might well be empty. I know ofno value--not even motherhood (I think of Mommie Dearest)--to which noone has ever objected. I would argue that universal consent is not required forsomething to be a universal value. Rather, the claim of a universal value isthat people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable.

When Mahatma Gandhi argued for the universalvalue of non-violence, he was not arguing that people everywhere already actedaccording to this value, but rather that they had good reason to see it asvaluable. Similarly, when Rabindranath Tagore argued for "the freedom ofthe mind" as a universal value, he was not saying that this claim isaccepted by all, but that all do have reason enough to accept it--a reason thathe did much to explore, present, and propagate.6Understood in this way, any claim thatsomething is a universal value involves some counterfactual analysis--inparticular, whether people might see some value in a claim that they have notyet considered adequately. All claims to universal value--not just that ofdemocracy--have this implicit presumption.

I would argue that it is with regard to thisoften implicit presumption that the biggest attitudinal shift towarddemocracy has occurred in the twentieth century. In considering democracy for acountry that does not have it and where many people may not yet have had theopportunity to consider it for actual practice, it is now presumed that thepeople involved would approve of it once it becomes a reality in their lives.In the nineteenth century this assumption typically would have not been made,but the presumption that is taken to be natural (what I earlier called the"default" position) has changed radically during the twentiethcentury.

It must also be noted that this change is,to a great extent, based on observing the history of the twentieth century. Asdemocracy has spread, its adherents have grown, not shrunk. Starting off fromEurope and America, democracy as a system has reached very many distant shores,where it has been met with willing participation and acceptance. Moreover, whenan existing democracy has been overthrown, there have been widespread protests,even though these protests have often been brutally suppressed. Many peoplehave been willing to risk their lives in the fight to bring back democracy. [EndPage 12]

Some who dispute the status of democracy asa universal value base their argument not on the absence of unanimity, but onthe presence of regional contrasts. These alleged contrasts are sometimesrelated to the poverty of some nations. According to this argument, poor peopleare interested, and have reason to be interested, in bread, not in democracy.This oft-repeated argument is fallacious at two different levels.

First, as discussed above, the protectiverole of democracy may be particularly important for the poor. This obviouslyapplies to potential famine victims who face starvation. It also applies to thedestitute thrown off the economic ladder in a financial crisis. People ineconomic need also need a political voice. Democracy is not a luxury that canawait the arrival of general prosperity.

Second, there is very little evidence thatpoor people, given the choice, prefer to reject democracy. It is thus of someinterest to note that when an erstwhile Indian government in the mid-1970stried out a similar argument to justify the alleged "emergency" (andthe suppression of various political and civil rights) that it had declared, anelection was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In thatfateful election, fought largely on this one overriding theme, the suppressionof basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indianelectorate--one of the poorest in the world--showed itself to be no less keenon protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than oncomplaining about economic deprivation.

To the extent that there has been anytesting of the proposition that the poor do not care about civil and politicalrights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be madeby observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand,Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia. Similarly, whilepolitical freedom is widely denied in Africa, there have been movements and protestsagainst such repression whenever circumstances have permitted them.

The Argument from Cultural Differences

There is also another argument in defense ofan allegedly fundamental regional contrast, one related not to economiccircumstances but to cultural differences. Perhaps the most famous of theseclaims relates to what have been called "Asian values." It has beenclaimed that Asians traditionally value discipline, not political freedom, andthus the attitude to democracy must inevitably be much more skeptical in thesecountries. I have discussed this thesis in some detail in my MorganthauMemorial Lecture at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.7

It is very hard to find any real basis forthis intellectual claim in the history of Asian cultures, especially if we lookat the classical [End Page 13]traditions of India, the Middle East,Iran, and other parts of Asia. For example, one of the earliest and mostemphatic statements advocating the tolerance of pluralism and the duty of thestate to protect minorities can be found in the inions of the Indianemperor Ashoka in the third century B.C.

Asia is, of course, a very large area,containing 60 percent of the world"s population, and generalizations about sucha vast set of peoples is not easy. Sometimes the advocates of "Asianvalues" have tended to look primarily at East Asia as the region ofparticular applicability. The general thesis of a contrast between the West andAsia often concentrates on the lands to the east of Thailand, even though thereis also a more ambitious claim that the rest of Asia is rather"similar." Lee Kuan Yew, to whom we must be grateful for being such aclear expositor (and for articulating fully what is often stated vaguely inthis tangled literature), outlines "the fundamental difference betweenWestern concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts" byexplaining, "when I say East Asians, I mean Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam,as distinct from Southeast Asia, which is a mix between the Sinic and theIndian, though Indian culture itself emphasizes similar values."8

Even East Asia itself, however, isremarkably diverse, with many variations to be found not only among Japan,China, Korea, and other countries of the region, but also within eachcountry. Confucius is the standard author quoted in interpreting Asian values,but he is not the only intellectual influence in these countries (in Japan,China, and Korea for example, there are very old and very widespread Buddhisttraditions, powerful for over a millennium and a half, and there are also otherinfluences, including a considerable Christian presence). There is nohomogeneous worship of order over freedom in any of these cultures.

Furthermore, Confucius himself did notrecommend blind allegiance to the state. When Zilu asks him "how to servea prince," Confucius replies (in a statement that the censors ofauthoritarian regimes may want to ponder), "Tell him the truth even if itoffends him."9Confucius is not averse to practical caution and tact, but does notforgo the recommendation to oppose a bad government (tactfully, if necessary):"When the [good] way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly.When the state has lost the way, act boldly and speak softly."10

Indeed, Confucius provides a clear pointer to the fact that the twopillars of the imagined edifice of Asian values, loyalty to family andobedience to the state, can be in severe conflict with each other. Manyadvocates of the power of "Asian values" see the role of the state asan extension of the role of the family, but as Confucius noted, there can betension between the two. The Governor of She told Confucius, [End Page 14]"Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his fatherstole a sheep, he denounced him." To this Confucius replied, "Amongmy people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for hisson, a son covers up for his father--and there is integrity in what they do."11

The monolithic interpretation of Asianvalues as hostile to democracy and political rights does not bear criticalscrutiny. I should not, I suppose, be too critical of the lack of scholarshipsupporting these beliefs, since those who have made these claims are notscholars but political leaders, often official or unofficial spokesmen forauthoritarian governments. It is, however, interesting to see that while weacademics can be impractical about practical politics, practical politicianscan, in turn, be rather impractical about scholarship.

It is not hard, of course, to findauthoritarian writings within the Asian traditions. But neither is it hard tofind them in Western classics: One has only to reflect on the writings of Platoor Aquinas to see that devotion to discipline is not a special Asian taste. Todismiss the plausibility of democracy as a universal value because of thepresence of some Asian writings on discipline and order would be similar torejecting the plausibility of democracy as a natural form of government inEurope or America today on the basis of the writings of Plato or Aquinas (notto mention the substantial medieval literature in support of the Inquisitions).

Due to the experience of contemporarypolitical battles, especially in the Middle East, Islam is often portrayed asfundamentally intolerant of and hostile to individual freedom. But the presenceof diversity and variety within a tradition applies very much to Islamas well. In India, Akbar and most of the other Moghul emperors (with thenotable exception of Aurangzeb) provide good examples of both the theory andpractice of political and religious tolerance. The Turkish emperors were oftenmore tolerant than their European contemporaries. Abundant examples can also befound among rulers in Cairo and Baghdad. Indeed, in the twelfth century, thegreat Jewish scholar Maimonides had to run away from an intolerant Europe(where he was born), and from its persecution of Jews, to the security of atolerant and urbane Cairo and the patronage of Sultan Saladin.

Diversity is a feature of most cultures inthe world. Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy thathas won out in the modern West is largely a result of a consensus thathas emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, andparticularly in the last century or so. To read in this a historical commitmentof the West--over the millennia-- to democracy, and then to contrast it withnon-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake.This tendency toward oversimplification can be seen not only in the writings ofsome governmental spokesmen [End Page 15]in Asia, but also in thetheories of some of the finest Western scholars themselves.

As an example from the writings of a majorscholar whose works, in many other ways, have been totally impressive, let mecite Samuel Huntington"s thesis on the clash of civilizations, where theheterogeneities within each culture get quite inadequate recognition.His study comes to the clear conclusion that "a sense of individualism anda tradition of rights and liberties" can be found in the West that are"unique among civilized societies."12Huntington also argues that "thecentral characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from othercivilizations, antedate the modernization of the West." In his view,"The West was West long before it was modern."13It is this thesis that--I have argued--doesnot survive historical scrutiny.

For every attempt by an Asian government spokesmanto contrast alleged "Asian values" with alleged Western ones, thereis, it seems, an attempt by a Western intellectual to make a similar contrastfrom the other side. But even though every Asian pull may be matched by aWestern push, the two together do not really manage to dent democracy"s claimto be a universal value.

Where the Debate Belongs

I have tried to cover a number of issuesrelated to the claim that democracy is a universal value. The value ofdemocracy includes its intrinsic importance in human life, its instrumentalrole in generating political incentives, and its constructivefunction in the formation of values (and in understanding the forceand feasibility of claims of needs, rights, and duties). These merits are notregional in character. Nor is the advocacy of discipline or order.Heterogeneity of values seems to characterize most, perhaps all, majorcultures. The cultural argument does not foreclose, nor indeed deeplyconstrain, the choices we can make today.

Those choices have to be made here and now,taking note of the functional roles of democracy, on which the case fordemocracy in the contemporary world depends. I have argued that this case isindeed strong and not regionally contingent. The force of the claim that democracyis a universal value lies, ultimately, in that strength. That is where thedebate

belongs. It cannot be disposed of byimagined cultural taboos or assumed civilizational predispositions imposed byour various pasts.

Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prizefor Economics, is Master of Trinity College,Cambridge, and Lamont UniversityProfessor Emeritus at Harvard University. The following essay is based on akeynote address that he delivered at a February 1999 conference in New Delhi on"Building a Worldwide Movement for Democracy," cosponsored by theNational Endowment for Democracy, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and theCentre for Policy Research (New Delhi). This essay draws on work more fullypresented in his book Development as Freedom, to be published by Alfred Knopflater this year.

Notes

1. In Aldous Huxley"s novelPoint Counter Point,this was enough to give anadequate excuseto a cheating husband, who tells his wife that he must go toLondon to study democracy in ancient India in the library of the BritishMuseum, while in reality he goes to see his mistress.

2. Adam Przeworski et al.,SustainableDemocracy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1995); Robert J. Barro, Getting It Right:Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

3. I have examined the empiricalevidence and causal connections in some detail in my bookDevelopment as Freedom, forthcoming from Knopf in 1999.

4. See my "Development:Which Way Now?"Economic Journal93 (December 1983);Resources, Values, andDevelopment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and my"Rationality and Social Choice," presidential address to the AmericanEconomic Association, published in American Economic Review in March1995. See also Jean Dr"eze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Frances D"Souza, ed., Starving in Silence:A Report on Famine and Censorship (London: Article 19 International Centreon Censorship, 1990); Human Rights Watch, Indivisible Human Rights: TheRelationship between Political and Civil Rights to Survival, Subsistence andPoverty (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992); and International Federationof Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, World Disaster Report 1994(Geneva: Red Cross, 1994).

5. Dr"eze and Sen,Hungerand Public Action.

6. See my "Tagore and His India,"New York Review of Books,26 June 1997.

7. Amartya Sen, "HumanRights and Asian Values," Morgenthau Memorial Lecture (NewYork: Carnegie Council on Ethicsand International Affairs, 1997), published in a shortened form in The NewRepublic, 14-21 July 1997.

8. Fareed Zakaria, "Culture is Destiny: A Conversation withLee Kuan Yew,"Foreign Affairs

73 (March-April 1994): 113.

9.The Analects of Confucius,Simon Leys, trans. (New York: Norton, 1997), 14.22, 70.

10.The Analects of Confucius,14.3, 66.

11.The Analects of Confucius,13.18, 63.

12. Samuel P. Huntington,The Clash of Civilizations andthe Remaking of World Order(NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 71.

13. Huntington,The Clashof Civilizations,69.

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