Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice

This book is a magnificent achievement: it reaches across philosophy and the social sciences, across research, policy and practice in the global North and South, and across many decades of debate and discussion within and outside the capability approach. It does so in a way which is readable and clear, and it manages to avoid on the one hand being too polemical, and on the other hand being too superficial. Ingrid Robeyns is uniquely well-placed to write such a book, being herself a well-established inter-disciplinary scholar whose work has contributed enormously to the development of the capability approach over the years. It has been a frustration for many of us that no comprehensive textbook on the capability approach yet exists, and this will fill that gap admirably.

The book is essential reading for social justice and wellbeing scholars and practitioners. Robeyns importantly points to the fact that many of the conceptual controversies of the past two decades have been largely resolved, and that the Capability Approach can now be used, inter alia, to study ways in which the welfare state, under pressure at present, can best be arranged.