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The Contractarian Constitutional Political Economy of James Buchanan

Roger Congleton

No 13-08, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: This paper attempts to outline and summarize the main body of work on one strand of James Buchanan's work, constitutional political economy. The grounding ideas and inferences of Buchanan's approach can be summarized as follows: (a) The appropriate method for analyzing and understanding social phenomena is the individual. (b) There are often mutual gains that can only be realized through collective action. (c) Collective action produces both property right systems (civil law) and collective decision-making systems (political constitutions). (d) One cannot know beforehand the ex-act consequences of rules, nor can one read the minds of those affected by those rules. (e) Every individual counts, so the legitimacy of collective action can only be assured by decision procedures grounded in unanimity. (f) Every agreement that meets the unanimity criteria is, by definition, an improvement. (g) However, the legitimacy of collective action in general and constitutional governance in particular requires that individuals be fundamentally equal in their roles as citizens, both at the constitutional level of choice and in the civil society framed by the constitution chosen. This paper shows how these ideas emerged in Buchanan's research and are used to develop a very rich constitutional political economy.

Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Journal Article: The contractarian constitutional political economy of James Buchanan (2014) Downloads
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