Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive

The author examines the foundations of economic value, arguing that existing individualistic and marginal-utility approaches fail to provide a coherent quantitative concept of social value. After analyzing formal and logical problems—such as the relativity of value, confusion between evaluation and measurement, and the limits of marginal utility—the study critiques prevailing psychological and epistemological assumptions and traces how atomistic methods prevent a social-scale measure of value. The work reconstructs presuppositions about preference, cost, and social interaction and offers a constructive theory that defines social value in terms that make measurement and policy analysis possible, with applications to money, distribution, and the relation between private preferences and collective worth.