Nussbaum, an eminent professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, is probably more widely known for her work with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen on identifying a new framework for thinking about development – a framework within which measures of ‘human development’ or, more precisely, the development of human capabilities, are given priority over simpler measures such as economic output. Rather than comparing societies by looking at aggregate data such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or levels of poverty, Nussbaum wants us to ask what each person is able to do and to be in that society, leading us to focus on both opportunities and substantial freedoms.

Much has been written on this approach by both Nussbaum and Sen, and by many others who have been persuaded by the virtues of this focus on capabilities. Indeed, much has also been done as well as written, from the UN’s adoption of an annual Human Development Report, to Sen’s use of his Nobel Prize money to establish a trust in his home state of West Bengal to promote and study education. Their scholarly work is designed to be used in practice – to displace the ‘entrenched but misguided theories’ used in development policy, which are ‘deeply mistaken’.

In this relatively short book, Nussbaum identifies the ten central capabilities that she argues must be secured by any ‘decent political order’ for all its citizens, and explains those capabilities that are really distinctive to her approach, together with the reasons why they should be preferred to other common approaches. Her aim here is to reach and persuade a much wider audience, and she writes with enormous clarity and purpose to achieve this.

In Australia, where I would argue that the concept of social justice has lost most of the purchase it ever had, this book is immediately helpful in thinking about a policy as complex and divisive as the Northern Territory Intervention. In a recent radio interview with two academics about its role, one was keen to reserve judgement until there was greater evidence about its impact on health indicators. The other wisely reminded the audience that in the end we have to weigh up any possible health benefits or other empirical evidence against the philosophical issue of deciding under which circumstances we think it is acceptable to force some groups of people into certain behaviours. Nussbaum’s approach strongly favours the right to respect, choice, and freedom over instrumental outcomes.

This framework reflects her substantial earlier work focused on displacing the family as a unit of policy analysis in favour of an intensely gendered and individual approach to capabilities. But most recently it has taken her into debates about the rights of the disabled and the aged, groups that have little to gain from the ‘revealed preference’ frameworks of economists or utilitarian calculations of aggregate welfare. In this context, Nussbaum insists that ‘a focus on dignity is quite different, for example, from a focus on satisfaction’, and is likely to lead to policies that favour and encourage agency ‘rather than choices that infantilize people and treat them as passive recipients of benefit’. So, along with the right to life, bodily health, and bodily integrity (a fundamental feminist demand), Nussbaum places great weight on education and on the conditions that ensure the right to political participation.

The ten capabilities are not intended to be utopian but ‘aspirational’, and with the definition of these human rights come inescapable duties for their protection – duties for which governments and political institutions are responsible. Nussbaum is insistent in her rejection of approaches to policy that focus on the ‘satisfaction’ of existing needs or preferences. Even if a majority in any particular society thinks it is acceptable for men to insist on sex with their unwilling wives, this is subordinate to the right to bodily integrity.

It is to government (and, in her many Indian examples, often state government) that Nussbaum looks for the protection and development of what she sees as the central capabilities. Behind this, however, sits her interest in democracy as active participation, and the importance of democratic deliberation in determining which freedoms are most important and how they should be created or preserved. In this time of profound political cynicism in countries such as Australia, her ambition for nations to create an ‘overlapping consensus’ sufficient to agree on these basic thresholds seems perfectly logical but equally utopian. But again, she provides a framework for thinking about whether it matters if Bill Gates or Oxfam gets to decide what development problems should receive attention and resources. Nussbaum is not opposing the good that comes from NGOs, but is asking us to think about the implications of giving such power to organisations that are not accountable.

In the end, this book has to compress a vast amount of multidisciplinary scholarship into two hundred pages. It is not written with much elegance, and quite often it is easy to see that the thinking of Nussbaum and the many collaborators who are working on this framework has had to be rather too compressed. For example, suddenly we are told that rich countries should give two per cent of their GDP to poorer countries. Why two per cent? To whom should it be given exactly and in what form? Occasionally, the recognition that the protection of central capabilities may involve conflicting choices is passed over with too little explicit reflection, as in the assertion that the ‘factory food industry … should be ended’, and artificial meat embraced.

The argument that this approach is neither specifically Western nor colonialist nor ‘cosmopolitan’ seems sometimes unnecessarily laboured, as though these particular criticisms hit a sore point; and there is a delightfully deliberate insistence on particular areas where Nussbaum feels Sen has got it wrong. But above all the reader is exhorted to see Nussbaum’s work as an evolving debate about what we might all, realistically, come to agree on through democratic deliberation as achievable human capabilities.

While Nussbaum sees the ten capabilities as irreducible, and fundamentally opposes measures of development based on the aggregation of indicators, she agrees that education lies at the heart of the capabilities approach – education which has space for ‘sense, imagination and thought’ as well as literacy and numeracy. Stuart Macintyre, rightly sceptical and critical of her previous book on the privileged role of the humanities and its link to democracy (ABR, September 2010), saw it as yet another utilitarian defence of these disciplines, and questioned the existence of any particular link between them and the development or protection of democracy. Nonetheless, education is indeed central to Nussbaum’s vision, and in this book she has provided something that will be an invaluable teaching resource, and that could inform discussion on everything from cigarette packaging and the ‘nanny state’ to political liberalism in the twenty-first century.