Democracy and Conflict: Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and John Dewey's Pragmatism [Hardcover]

The economist Kenneth Arrow proved in 1951 that a society of diverse individual preferences could only by ordered by dictatorship. His impossibility theorem is still an axiom of contemporary welfare economics and has never been seriously challenged. The American philosopher John Dewey, who died in 1952, had claimed that voting and electoral mechanisms do not define democratic self-government. His broad conception of social conflict addresses preference diversity and resolves Arrows impossibility.
Since the 1980s, political scientists have focused on decision through democratic deliberation. Dewey saw that conversation alone is inadequate for resolution of conflicts in a democracy. Conflict is accompanied by discourse, but preferences are grounded in habits. Social habits resist adjustment in response to discourse alone, but demonstrably adjust in the process of conflict resolution, Preference conflict is distinguished from Marxist and later models, as a discovery and transformation process. It advances an original, updated theory of social conflict in a democracy relevant to today's problematic situations from discrimination to climate change and political polarization.

In 1951, Kenneth Arrow produced a theory that made democratic resolution of social conflict seem impossible. Recent events have made the theory look good. But what about the real cases in which impasses have been broken democratically, yielding benefits to all? Arrows theory is too narrow to be right. With John Deweys help, Frederic Kellogg takes a broader, more fluid, more hopeful view. If you want to know how democratic change can happen, look at how it has. Jeffrey Stout, Princeton University, author of Democracy and Tradition

If anyone can theorize a purely homegrown approach to the conflicts raging in the America of our times, it is Frederic Kellogg. His deep and subtle grasp of our heritage il3a