This paper explores an approach to social choice which is an alternative to Kenneth J. Arrow's social welfare function. The author considers 'best fit' social rankings for any individual preferences through the definition of levels of agreement between preferences and rankings. He thereby avoids the pairwise approach of Arrow's independence and Pareto conditions and he demonstrates the possibility of nondictatorial social choice. The author considers the rationality implications of a nonunique outcome and determines additional properties, including majority-consistency, of the Condorcet process for determining the rankings. The approach also allows an interpretation of A. Sen's 'impossibility of a Paretian liberal' in terms of individual agreement. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.
