Paradoxes of the Enlightenment Era

Abstract

The history of the theory of voting is relatively long but discontinuous. The first systematic accounts seem to have been written in the late 18’th century just before the French 1789 revolution. Surely, some descriptions of voting procedures antedate the French writers. The volume of social choice classics edited and translated by McLean and Urken (1995) contains a writing from the second century AD (by Pliny the Younger) as well as one from the 13’th century (by Nicolaus Cusanus). In addition, Pufendorf in the 17’th century discussed themes related to voting procedures (Lagerspetz 1986). But it seems that Jean-Charles de Borda was the first to look at voting procedures from the viewpoint of aggregating individual opinions so that the end result-the social choice — would bear a reasonable relation to the opinions. Borda’s view was thus in a sense instrumental: voting procedures are methods of combining individual opinions and some methods are better than others with respect to certain criteria.