I have a history question for which I've had trouble finding a good answer.


The common story about nonmeasurable sets is that Vitali showed that one existed using the Axiom of Choice, and Lebesgue et al. put the blame squarely on this axiom and its non-constructive character. It was noticed however that some amount of choice was required to get measure theory off the ground, namely Dependent Choice seemed to be the principle typically employed. But the full axiom of choice which allows uncountably many arbitrary choices to be made is of a different character, and is the culprit behind the pathological sets. This viewpoint was not really justified until Solovay showed in the 1960s that ZF+DC could not prove the existence of a nonmeasurable set, assuming the consistency of an inaccessible cardinal.


My question is, in the many years before Solovay's theorem, was there any effort aimed at showing the existence of a nonmeasurable set without the use of the full AC? Was something like the following question ever posed or worked on: "Can constructions similar to those of Vitali, Hausdorff, and Banach-Tarski be done without appeal to the Axiom of Choice?"



construction of nonmeasurable sets
Paul Cohen posed the question of getting a model of "All Sets Lebesgue Measurable" in his early talks on his own results. (He did not mention the principle of Dependent Choices. Adding that to the problem was my idea.) I know of no work trying to prove the Vitali result constructively. Certainly Cohen's conjecture (which I presume was widely shared) was that the use of choice was essential.


It is quite striking (if one works through Halmos) that all the positive results in measure theory can be carried out in ZF + DC. Only the counterexample section uses full choice.


