> Yup. Both are authoritarian and statist. If more of them knew about Keynes's
> foreword to the German edition of The General Theory, in which he says the
> following, they might do something with it.
>
> <http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/foregt.html>
>
> The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following
> book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a
> totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and
> distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free
> competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons
> that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory. Since it is
> based on fewer hypotheses than the orthodox theory, it can accommodate
> itself all the easier to a wider field of varying conditions. Although I
> have, after all, worked it out with a view to the conditions prevailing in
> the Anglo-Saxon countries where a large degree of laissez-faire still
> prevails, nevertheless it remains applicable to situations in which state
> management is more pronounced. For the theory of psychological laws which
> bring consumption and saving into relationship with each other, the
> influence of loan expenditures on prices, and real wages, the role played by
> the rate of interest—all these basic ideas also remain under such conditions
> necessary parts of our plan of thought.___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
=============
Of course, there is a similar problem with neoclassical models of choices and markets:
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/j432573r414m16p1/>
Abstract A social welfare function satisfying Arrow's independence axiom is constant or authoritarian if it generates continuous and transitive social preferences over the space of allocations of public and private goods, and individual preferences have the classical economic properties. The social welfare function will be oligarchical if it generates continuous and quasitransitive social preferences and satisfies a weak version of the Pareto criterion in addition to the independence axiom.
Donald E. Campbell1 (1) Department of Economics, College of William and Mary, 23187-8795 Williamsburg, VA, USA
Received: 13 February 1991 Accepted: 15 January 1992
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation grant no. SES 9007953. I am grateful to anonymous referees whose suggestions led to several substantial improvements.
**********
Sen has spent quite a bit on ink dealing with the problems of the above........