A historical introduction to normative economics

Serge-Christophe Kolm
Additional contact information
Serge-Christophe Kolm: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 54, Bd. Raspail, F-75006 Paris, France

Social Choice and Welfare, 2000, vol. 17, issue 4, 707-738

Abstract: The central way in which people judge the economy is process liberalism, whose rational form, however, implies specific redistributions and roles for the public sector. Other principles also belong to procedural justice, and others refer to happiness. Among the latter, the utilitarian ethos and form have a limited scope of relevance. This has led to the consideration of more general social maximands. However, seeing a priori the general social optimum as a maximum imposes non-needed requirements, sometimes opposes rationality and equity, and always demands justification. In particular, this maximizing form cannot be justified as representing an individual's judgment. But, at any rate, the general optimum is defined otherwise.

Date: 2000-08-02
Note: Received: 2 March 1999/Accepted: 6 October 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/0017004/00170707.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:17:y:2000:i:4:p:707-738

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().