Whether consumer sovereignty is an appropriate principle for the optimization and evaluation of the design and performance of economic systems is a question that is posed by economics, but it can, by and large, not be answered within economics. Instead, the exploration undertaken in this book pursues issues raised by this question into the territories of moral and political philosophy, of sociological role theory and socialization theory, of clinical psychology and the sociology of mental illness, and of the literature on indicators of the “quality of life” and of deprivation. The areas within economics that are traversed are, apart from conceptions of consumer sovereignty, primarily welfare economics and the economics of income distribution. Writings that bridge two or more of these diverse areas have been particularly emphasized. It should be noted, however, that I refer not so much to the recent literature that has straddled specifically political philosophy and neoclassical economics as rather to writings that take cognizance of sociology's central idea of socialization.