Books

First edition, first printing, of the Nobel Prize-winning economist's brilliant doctoral thesis. The work develops Arrow's famed "impossibility theorum", which states that under certain conditions of rationality and equality, no voting system will accurately reflect individual preferences when more than two choices are involved. "Employing the notational system of symbolic logic, at the time unfamiliar to economists, Arrow proposed to solve a question in politics which no economist and few political scientists had ever posed: suppose all individuals can rank all states of the world in order of preference, is it possible to find a voting rule that will always select one of those states as 'most preferred'?" (Blaug, p. 6). Arrow's work was published as number 12 in the series of Cowles Commission Monographs. Provenance: Charles F. Carter (1919-2002), the economist and inaugural vice-chancellor of the University of Lancaster, with his signature (dated 1952) to the front free endpaper. In 1952, Carter became professor of applied economics at Queen's University, Belfast. Mark Blaug, Great Economists before Keynes, 1997. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, front cover with series device in gilt. With dust jacket. Tables and formulas in the text. Bookseller's ticket of Heffer & Sons to front pastedown. Light bumping and rubbing, faint sunning to spine, minor foxing to endpapers and edges; slight foxing and marking to jacket, mild toning to spine, jacket neatly restored to spine panel and extremities with loss to a few letters, unclipped: a very good copy in good jacket.