AGV = the Arrow General View = AT & ARC & AMC
Note that Arrow’s phrasing on ARC and AMC is a bit ambiguous. The “to be imposed” might not be moral but merely logical, in a sense that one needs at least some conditions to make a constitution. However, the topic of collective choice is distinctly a moral one. Secondly, Arrow emphasises what is to be imposed and what is reasonable, but he may not be in a position to impose his views and morals on us. The best interpretation of the situation likely is as follows. Presume that Arrow sees the Founding Fathers at work. He then retreats to his office, and conjectures: ‘If I interprete correctly what they want, then it are these properties.’ Thus the ARC and AMC are not quite Arrow’s personal ideas. Above quotes can best be interpreted as factual statements on what people apparently want and consider reasonable.
Arrow’s general view has been accepted in many places in the literature and textbooks, see Luce & Raiffa (1957), Johansen (1969), Sen (1986) or various other entries in that same Palgrave. For example, Tobin (1990):
“We know there is no way to aggregate individual preferences into social rankings (...). As if this were not obvious, Kenneth Arrow proved it rigorously years ago. The impossibility applies to aggregations across contemporaneous cohorts, a fortiori across generations living and unborn.”
In a much used book on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA), A.K. Dasgupta & D.W. Pearce (1980):
“(...) no escape route (...) seems yet to be available.”
Apparently feeling that Arrow's argument destroys the foundations of CBA, they find themselves forced, rather grudgingly, to reduce CBA to something like information gathering.
In an otherwise recommendable volume of Statistical Science, Gill & Gainous (2002) find:
“In fact, he proved that unless one is willing to violate one of a set of reasonable democratic norms, (…inconsisteny...) is an inevitability. (…) Therefore, collective social decisions cannot yield a truly democratic system in this sense.”
Jorgenson (1990), once president of the Econometric Society, concludes ‘more positively’ to dictatorship: