History of textbook models: the concept of a legitimate State in economics —origins, the dead-end and two escape routes

The failure of neoclassical economics to provide a blueprint for the rational society was foretold in Chapter 3. It was there that the origins of neoclassical models were traced to the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham (see Section 3.1.2). Bentham, you might recall, made one simplistic assumption about human beings (that they seek pleasure) in order to present his major ethical and political claim: each person ought to aim for the greatest happiness for the greatest number (i.e. maximum average utility). Of course he could not prove that utility maximisation by each would lead each to want maximum average utility. This failure was no doubt a precursor to the problems neoclassical economics encountered (see Chapter 8) when it tried to construct a social utility or welfare function.