The Constitution

David Reisman

Chapter 2 in The Political Economy of James Buchanan, 1990, pp 7-30 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Buchanan is an economist who believes that economics is not about maximisation in conditions of static scarcity so much as about what Hayek and other Austrians call ‘catallaxy’,1 i.e. the processes of voluntarily exchanging and agreeing as between autonomous individuals. These processes are to be observed in far more areas of social life than merely the trading of apples for oranges, and one of those areas must inevitably be the polity: ‘By a more or less natural extension of the catallactic approach, economists can look on politics and on political processes in terms of the exchange paradigm.’2 It is thus in terms of the exchange paradigm that the constitution must be conceptualised: ‘As an economist, I am a specialist in contract,’3 Buchanan states, and the contract in question, he might well have added, can just as easily involve all citizens in a society as both trading-partners in a greengrocer’s shop.

Keywords: Political Economy; Original Position; Free Rider; Fair Procedure; Representative Individual (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1990
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-10519-9_2

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10519-9_2

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