"There was, however, another approach to justice that also emerged at about the same time in the works of other Enlightenment thinkers – other than the social contract theorists of that period. These theorists did not erect a fully developed structure of a theory of justice, but the ingredients of a different approach – different from the social contract theory – which they helped to identify, can be developed from their alternative understanding of the demands of justice. These theorists (including Adam Smith, the Marquis de Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century, and extended later to John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, among others) took a variety of approaches that differed in many ways from each other, but shared a common interest in making comparisons between different ways in which people’s lives may go, jointly influenced by the working of institutions, people’s actual behaviour, their social interactions and other factors that significantly impact on what actually happens. My attempt at advancing a theory of justice closely relates to this alternative foundation. The analytical – and rather mathematical – discipline of ‘social choice theory’, which had its origin in the works of French mathematicians in the eighteenth century, in particular the Marquis de Condorcet, but also others like Borda, and which has been revived and reformulated in our times by Kenneth Arrow, also belongs to this second line of investigation."