The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its thousand charms to the unfree citizens. The author explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism.

Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development. Having come to the conclusion that development is best summed up as the expansion of freedom, Sen examines traditional definitions and understandings of the term. He says people tend to think of freedoms as economic (the freedom to enter into market exchanges) or political (the freedom to vote and be an active citizen), and tries to understand why the definition has been so narrow hitherto. He concludes that an evaluation of true freedom must necessarily include the freedom to access social services such as healthcare, sanitation and nutrition, just as much as it must acknowledge economic and political freedoms. Evaluating the relevance of the current thinking behind development, Sen’s concludes that the term ‘freedom’ cannot simply be about income. In many ways, measuring income does not account for various “unfreedoms” (manmade or natural bars to wellbeing) that hinder development. Sen’s evaluation is all the more powerful for its clarity: "The freedom-centered perspective has a generic similarity to the common concern with ‘quality of life."

This seminal Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary research on economic freedom, using multidisciplinary methods to assess studies of the determinants and consequences of market-oriented institutions and policies. Niclas Berggren brings together world-leading experts in their respective fields to explore the notion of economic freedom in the history of economic thought, to present measures of economic freedom and to provide overviews of the latest empirical research.

This book presents a unique collection of interviews on the meaning of freedom in the modern world. Drawing on the expertise of the world's leading historians, philosophers, and most influential activist it takes up the question of our highest ideal from a diverse and exciting range of perspectives.

In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on freedom’s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account (only) for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capability approach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ​

As America approaches her 250th birthday, she is also approaching a fork in the road. The choice before us is moral and boils down to two terms: liberty or social justice? We cannot have both. This book, written by a Swedish immigrant, lays out the moral case for returning America to the Christian, libertarian values that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These values guarantee liberty and opportunity, but they also require responsible citizenship in return. In understanding the latter, we can resurrect the former. By contrast, the failure to understand responsible citizenship and its critical role in defending liberty opens the door for America to irrevocably change character. Our country is already on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged egalitarian welfare state, defined not by liberty, but by the endless pursuit of social justice. As this book explains, there is a path back to freedom, one illuminated by faith, paved with practical, sensible policy reforms and traveled by people ready to exercise responsible citizenship.