ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the postmodern evaporation of the concept of majority will. It sums up the ontological dilemmas which have arisen from a long history of voting paradoxes as outlined by Pliny the Younger in ancient Rome, Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, Borda and Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and finally by Kenneth Arrow in 1951. Although the mathematical proof for the possibility of such paradoxes remains incontestable, more recent critics aim to show that their empirical probability is significantly lower than it is usually suggested. What is not disputed, however, is that voting paradoxes, circularities, and the intransitivity of public preferences are impossible to eliminate completely, whereby uncritical belief in the existence of a so-called majority as “something” or “someone,” a sort of metaphysical subject has by now become extremely difficult to maintain.
