Amartya Sen: British Identity

The crucial importance of national identity, Amartya Sen argues, lies in its constructive political and civil role.

This understanding goes against the fashionable public policy view that the British people should be seen as a federation of diverse ethnicities. In the multiple affiliations that all persons have through their different concerns, national identity is not intermediated through other loyalties – linked with community, or religion, or anything else.

After a short lecture on British identity, Sen was interviewed by Jon Snow, the main presenter of Channel 4 News.

Amartya Sen is a Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and author of the new book Identity and Violence.

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