Majoritarian Inconsistency, Arrow Impossibility and the Comparative Interpretation: a Context- Based View

For a social scientist of a particular kind, the first thought that springs to mind in association with ‘inconsistency’ is Arrow’s famous impossibility theorem. The association is a natural one because, in the original formulation, inconsistency plays a double role in Arrow’s theorem. At the first level, the requirement that any aggregate ‘community’ ranking of social states be transitive is akin to a kind of consistency requirement. At a second level, the impossibility result itself is a demonstration of logical inconsistency between various desiderata that are proposed for the aggregate social ordering – of which desiderata, transitivity (or consistency) at the substantive level is one.