ABSTRACT
In the original construction of the neo-classical conception of the economy, preferences of individuals were taken to form an irreducible foundation for analysis which must be taken as given and as incapable of theoretical deduction. The implication of this givenness of preferences was also that individual need could not be viewed as directly social in character. In fact, the utilitarian predilection of nineteenth-century (and even of much current) economic thought served to strongly inhibit any development of the idea that individual need was the product of a social milieu however the latter might be conceived. At the same time this idea of need as both personal datum and ultimate foundation of analysis presented economics with a real analytic impediment when it came to the deduction of the economic system as a system of interrelated economic actors taken as a whole. To the extent that economics attempted to ground itself in needs of individuals which were not of an intrinsically social character it found itself faced with the necessity of building up the economic system as the outward expression of otherwise isolated and independent units. To accomplish this, however, it was necessary to attribute to the particular units, the individual economic actors whose sum is to be the economic system, the necessary characteristics which will lead them to engage in activity appropriate to the construction of an economic world of interacting subjects and of a world of social relations as a whole, a 'social system.' This, however, implies the specification of the individual and in that contradicts the originally posited independence of the units of social life. Where the latter is maintained it is not legitimate to assume that individuals will behave in such a manner as to, through that behavior, co-operate in the construction of the economic and social system. As a result of this it is necessary at the outset to clearly specify the composition of individual preferences as possessing, for example, the characteristics of consistency and completeness. Yet, within economic theory, such a specification of individual preference must remain arbitrary. While this is necessarily the case at the same time the determinateness of need from the standpoint of the deduction of the market system and its requirements precludes any purely empirical derivation of preference functions. The fact that the deduction of a market requires a specific configuration of need implies that the market and those needs are connected by links of necessity which cannot be grasped by empirical arguments of a probablistic
character. The connection of need to a market environment reveals precisely that inner necessity of the determination of need in a particular manner which requires theoretical derivation and explanation. This necessity, in effect, connects need to the inner logic of the market system. If individual need is so determined, however, it must by that very fact, be possible to give a theoretical account for that determination.
