Impossibility Theorem

It is amazing to reread “The Road to Serfdom” (1944) and to recall the paper “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare” (1950) by Kenneth J. Arrow. Specifically, Chapters 5 and 6 of Hayek’s book seem to be a philosophical statement about the consequences of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Nonetheless, being both works close in time, the complexity of the ideas contained in them prevents us from suspecting any mutual influence, and we must conclude that the parallelism is mostly due to the zeitgeist.