[lbo-talk] Poll of Top 5 Public Intellectuals! Vote For Chomsky!

[Ted Winslow]

Martha Nussbaum's version of the "capabilities" approach has much in  
common with Marx, as she herself points out.  She frequently quotes  
with approval Marx's contrasting of the true idea of ""the rich human  
being and the rich human need" with the idea of them found in  
"political economy."

“It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political  
economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich  
human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality  
of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realisation  
exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise  
the poverty of man – under the assumption of socialism – receives in  
equal measure a human and therefore social significance.

             “Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human  
being to experience the need of the greatest wealth – the other human  
being.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

Her account of the care care infants and children need if they are to  
develop the "capabilities" constitutive of  "riches" in this sense is  
significantly influenced by the "object relations" version of  
psychoanalysis, particularly as this is developed in the writings of  
Fairbairn and Winnicott (see Chap. 4 in Upheavals of Thought).

She is the source I suspect of the best aspects of Sen's own version  
of the approach.

Ted