Abstract

How can societies justify collective choices that interfere with individual freedom when citizens disagree about fundamental values? In Social Choice and Public Reason, economist and philosopher Cyril Hédoin addresses this challenge facing diverse liberal societies by combining social choice theory with public reason liberalism. The book introduces the Public Reason Model of Social Choice, which merges social choice theory’s formal structure with key concepts from public reason liberalism—persons, consent, values, and public reason—to establish conditions for publicly justified collective decisions. This framework is articulated with a game-theoretic account of how conventions, social norms, and law shape society’s choices, while acknowledging that some effective rules may lack public justification. The book examines how this model operates in pluralistic societies marked by deep disagreement, identifying various forms of dissent from tentative to foundational. The framework reveals how democratic and non-democratic choice mechanisms, along with polycentric governance, can address liberal sectarianism—the unjustified dismissal of particular reasons in collective decision-making. Drawing on normative economics, game theory, and political philosophy, Social Choice and Public Reason offers a rigorous theoretical framework for understanding how diverse societies can justify collective choices despite fundamental disagreements about values and social arrangements. The work bridges abstract social choice theory with practical questions of political legitimacy in contemporary liberal democracies.