Book: 'The Idea of Justice'; Author: Amartya Sen; Publisher: Penguin-Allen Lane; Price: 25 pounds (Rs.2,000)

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explores the concept of justice in his new book and comes up with an alternative to the prevailing model, urging the reader to look at today's system -- both judicial and social -- with a critical eye.

Sen's vision of justice and a perfect social order is non-parochial, inclusive and humane. It is entrenched in reason and helps remove inequities. His idea of justice is free of the tyranny of majoritarian will and one that touches lives that people actually live. In the process, it takes global concerns into account.

The economist-philosopher outlines a model that is compassionate. He uses history to drive home the need for mercy. 'Twenty-five hundred years ago, when young Gautama, later known as the Buddha, left his princely home in the foothills of Himalayas in search of enlightenment, he was moved specifically by the sight of mortality, morbidity and disability around him, and it agitated him greatly.'

Sen says it is easy to understand the sources of Gautama Buddha's agony and 'appreciate the centrality of the human lives in reasoned assessments of the world we live in'. This, he says, is a central feature of the traditional Indian perspective of 'nyaya' (justice) in contrast to 'niti' (rules). The Nobel laureate's model of justice draws from nyaya.

He quotes from Thomas Hobbes' 'Leviathan' to show where the search for an alternative idea of justice should begin. Hobbes wrote that the lives of people are 'nasty, brutish and short'.

'That was a good starting point for a theory of justice in 1651 and I am afraid that it is still a good starting point for a theory of justice today,' writes Sen, who teaches in Harvard University.

The idea is to make people's lives liveable and pleasant through a just social set-up, he indicates.

In his hallmark lucid style, Sen uses examples from everyday life to substantiate his arguments for a new system of justice.

Quoting from Charles Dickens' 'Great Expectations', he writes: 'In this little world in which children have their existence there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt as injustice.'

The strong perception of this injustice applies to the adult as well, he says.

'But what moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.'

Sen argues that the mainstream system of justice, despite several achievements, has taken us in the wrong direction.

The big difference between Sen and most other theorists of justice is that they use one strand of 'enlightenment thinking', while he uses another.