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Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics but his intellectual terrain has transcended disciplinary boundaries into the political, social and philosophical throughout his illustrious career (Morris, 2009, p. 1). Interviewed in 2009 as his magisterial The Idea of Justice was published, Sen pondered on his student days at the University of Calcutta (1951-1953) and reflected that at that time “Whether you sat in Calcutta, Saigon, Tokyo or Peking, Marx was a huge presence. Marxism was anti-imperialist and also intellectual. So I was attracted by that” (Derbyshire, 2009). Even so, as the interviewer noted, Sen was never a Marxist, being more drawn to the work of Adam Smith and in particular his Theory of Moral Sentiments both then and for the rest of his life. However, Sen’s intellectual trajectory is more varied than that as he himself had declared three years earlier when he stated: “I take much pride (and I think that is the right word) in the fact that my ideas are not ‘rootless’ – they are in the ‘tradition’ established by some very great people”, and these “intellectual instigators” include: Aristotle, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Kenneth Arrow (Sen, 2006, pp. 80-81). Sen’s adolescent attraction towards Marx developed into the mature “pride” of being influenced by his ideas, “notably for teaching us that the most terrible inequalities may be hidden behind an illusion of normality and justice”. I begin by briefly examining how Marx fits into Sen’s overall approach to justice and Sen’s inclusion of him with other theorists. I then consider how he praises Marx for his more nuanced understanding of human identity that was not simply based on class but included other social groupings (Sen, 2009, pp. 120-121, 2010, pp. 245, 247). Sen also cites Marx’s analysis of “false consciousness” or “objective illusion” as a “concept that he uses in his investigation of the underdogs in the class hierarchy” and which also informs Sen’s understanding of justice (Sen, 2006, p. 82, see also Sen, 2005, p. 8, 2010, pp. 163-164). Finally, I explore the conflicting claims that can arise from Sen’s endorsement of Marx as part of his discussion of just distribution (Sen, 1982, pp. 250 and 427, 1984, pp. 73, 80, 285 and...