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This article recalls the ambitions and theoretical issues that led Sen to develop a new conception of individual advantage and social evaluation. This Capability Approach (CA) is often regarded as moral philosophy. However, it arose from the work of a social choice theorist, whose eclecticism allowed a social choice approach to be formulated, which is more open and less mechanistic than that proposed by Arrow (1950). Due to its new focus on the scope of individual potentials and capacities, and a substantial shift from rationality to reason, Sen’s CA provides a renewed theoretical framework for normative economics.