ABSTRACT
In her little book, Economic Philosophy, Joan Robinson undertakes a commentary on utility (Chapter 3) which is partly a historical discursus and partly a critique of the concept. The discussion, as one would expect in a short personal tract covering the whole of political economy, is spare; and, since there is so little space to develop arguments, nothing much is made of the insights offered. Nevertheless, they contain all that is necessary to develop a thoroughgoing critical assessment of the axiomatic account of preference and choice; which is to say that her arguments can be read as a kind of précis of a thoroughgoing critique of neoclassical choice theory. This critique, it has to be emphasised, is a logical one, that is, it goes to the internal coherence of the axiomatic account; it has nothing to do with theempirical question as to whether or not preferences are stable over time, pace Hahn. In this regard, the critique bears a certain similarity with that made in the Capital Debates: a fact of which
Joan Robinson was herself aware (1962: 66 – 7).1 That being said, it needs to be emphasised that her own presentation of the issues in Chapter 3 of her book is, as suggested, really only a ‘prelude to a critique’. The purpose of this essay, then, is to sketch in some of the details of the fuller version. The general plan of attack is as follows: first, some counter-examples to the axiomatic theory of choice are presented which undercut its universalistic claims; the logical implications for the theory are then drawn; these negative conclusions are then canvassed in some explicitly economic contexts; and, finally, some implications for welfare economics are drawn.
