ABSTRACT
Sen’s CA constitutes one of the major and most promising normative paradigms today. Yet, notwithstanding its force and appeal, this model is relatively reticent on what institutional presuppositions fortify the capable agent. In this chapter I suggest that CA remains incomplete and its force is compromised because the institutional arrangements that consolidate and nourish capabilities suffer from abstract conceptions of the social. Although not a fatal weakness in CA, this institutional deficit cannot be rectified from within the programme’s epistemological and normative hard core only. Instead, it needs to be aided by institutional configurations articulated in sociological theory rather than breaking with such a project on the assumption that it is overambitious as CA suggests is the case with Rawls. Instead, I argue that the normative patterns that Sen adumbrates in his most programmatic text, Development as Freedom, can be reconstructed by reference to Parsons’ functional prerequisites known as AGIL. Drawing also on the work of other sociologists I use the Parsons–Sen synthesis to advance the ‘capable institution’ thesis and thus contribute in this piecemeal fashion to extending CA to sociology, sketching the coordinates for a macro-theory of capabilities. I also consider challenges that stem from Luhmann’s systems theory.
