'Stability in Voting'. Pp. 33-43 in: Econometrica, Vol. 29, No. 1, January 1961.

Entire issue offered. Original wrappers. Very Good+. 'I was intrigued by a paper by Michael Dummett and Robin Farquharson published in Econometrica in 1961. I was intrigued for three reasons. Firstly, I had never heard of the authors. Secondly, in the first pages of the paper, what would become, more than ten years later, one of the most famous results of the social choice literature, viz. the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, was conjectured in passing. Thirdly, the used proof technique was 'different' ' (Maurice Salles, 'Michael Dummett on Social Choice and Voting', Centre for Research in Economics and Management, Public Economics and Social Choice series working paper 16; Salles adds in footnote 1, 'The originality of the proof technique is reminiscent of the proof used to show, given an acyclic binary relation over a finite set of elements, the existence of maximal elements in this finite set'). 'Michael Dummett is famous among social science theorists for his joint paper with Robin Farquharson published in Econometrica in 1961. . 'I was first interested in the theory of voting by Robin Farquharson who was a very brilliant young man and had become interested in the theory of voting while he was still an undergraduate. I knew him well, and then we wrote a paper together and that was my first contribution to the subject, in print anyway. John Hicks who, as professor, was a Fellow of All Souls at the same time as I was, congratulated me on having a paper published in Econometrica. Well then as you know Robin Farquharson fell victim to this awful mental illness and couldn't really do any more creative work. . [There was] this dramatic episode when he entered the prize fellowship examination at All Souls. He quite certainly would have been elected but for the insane telephone conversation he had with the Warden on the eve of the election meeting -- the first manifestation of the mental illness from which he suffered for the rest of his life. . Robin Farquharson said we should send it to Econometrica, so I sent it to Econometrica. . I can't remember who actually wrote the main body of the text. I mean, we wrote it together, but the machinery, the technical notions and technical vocabulary, that all came from him' ('An interview with Michael Dummett: from analytical philosophy to voting analysis and beyond', by Rudolf Fara and Maurice Salles, on the LSE Web site).…