Governance by true believers: supreme duties with and without totalitarianism

Roger Congleton

Constitutional Political Economy, 2020, vol. 31, issue 1, No 5, 141 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper analyzes how governance by true believers differs from that by ordinary idealists and pragmatists. To do so, the paper develops a semi-lexicographic framework for analyzing behavior of persons who have internalized belief systems with “supreme” duties. It uses that framework to analyze the extent to which such duties tend to affect private behavior and demands for public policies. Bernholz’s research on totalitarian systems demonstrates that many of the least attractive governments in human history have been motivated by totalitarian belief systems. This paper agrees with that conclusion but suggests that many other results are also possible and that some of the most attractive governments in human history also have been motivated by belief systems with supreme duties.

Keywords: Supreme values; Supreme duties; Governing institutions; Totalitarianism; Political theory; Semi-lexicographic utility functions; Deontology; Constitutional constraints; Liberalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 O21 P16 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-020-09300-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:31:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s10602-020-09300-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-020-09300-y

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().