As I write, the new welfare economics is just over four decades old. This subject, in its essentials as we know it today, was born when the 24-year-old Abram Bergson – then still a Harvard graduate student – wrote his classic 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article. To one like myself, who before 1938 knew all the relevant literature on welfare economics and just could not make coherent sense of it, Bergson's work came like a flash of lightning, describable only in the words of the pontifical poet:

King Alphonse claimed that if he had been in on the Creation, he could have done a better job. By sheer good luck, as a fellow graduate student and comrade at arms, I was in on Bergson's creation: but time has shown that I have not been able to do a better job of it; nor, I believe, has anyone else – and this despite the quite confused rumors that Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem rendered Bergson's “social welfare function” somehow nonexistent or self-contradictory.

Here I hope to set the record straight as only a living witness and participant can. After a few introductory sections that sketch the historical setting of modern welfare economics, I provide under the heading “Existence and Property of a Bergsonian Social Welfare Function” an analytical exposition of some of the fundamentals of the Bergsonian welfare economics.