[T]he social order is a sacred right which serves as a foundation for all other rights. This right, however, since it comes not by nature, must have been built upon convention. To discover what these conventions are is the matter of our inquiry.

Although the economic system can be regarded as a mechanism for adjusting means to ends, the ends in question are ordinarily not a single system of ends, but as many independent systems as there are “individuals” in the community. This appears to introduce a hopeless arbitrariness into the testing of efficiency [of any given economic organization]. You cannot take a temperature when you have to use, not one thermometer, but an immense number of different thermometers, working on different principles, and with no necessary correlation between their registrations. How is this difficulty to be overcome?