Consumer sovereignty is a central normative principle in contemporary assessments of economic policies and systems. It underlies discussions of optimization and evaluation regarding the design and performance of economies and their constituent institutions, and in particular of the coordination mechanisms in economic systems, such as markets and collective planning. It has been referred to as the “Archimedian point of reference” in economic evaluation (Worland 1967:205). There is certainly no question that it is the core value of welfare economics. In Western industrially advanced nations – of both the conservatively capitalist and the social-democratic variety – it also underlies several of the most central goals guiding actual economic policy.

Given this normative centrality of the principle of consumer sovereignty, one would expect that it would have received considerable attention in the literature. In fact, it has not. It has been explicitly analyzed only to a very limited extent. (Hutt 1936:ch. 12; Fraser 1939; and Rothenberg 1968 are noteworthy in this respect.) At the same time, however, much normative discussion in welfare economics, political theory, and social philosophy has concentrated on ideas that are part of or overlap with the notion of consumer sovereignty.