Institutional Failure

David Reisman

Chapter 4 in The Political Economy of James Buchanan, 1990, pp 54-73 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Buchanan experienced student revolt at first hand in the 1960s, both at the LSE in 1967 and at UCLA (where a bomb exploded in the Economics Department) in 1968. Believing as he does that ‘ingrained in Western tradition is a sense of respect for the rights of others, including property rights’,1 he was bound to regard the ‘intolerance’ of those troubled years as a serious threat to that tradition and to recognise in the ‘chaos’, the ‘trespass’, the ‘violence’, the ‘social and political vandalism’, the ‘terrorist tactics’, the ‘class, race, and national hatred’2 of those bad times nothing less than the embryo of the Hobbesian state of nature. Even so, Buchanan was quick to commit sociology in public and to declare that ‘student activism is the result, rather than the cause, of social discontent’.3 Student activism, Buchanan insisted, was more than an isolated and an ad hoc instance of spontaneous combustion. Rather, it was a sensitive social indicator of a deteriorating moral climate characterised by the ‘now pervasive attitude which allows anarchist departures from constitutional procedures so long as the ‘cause is good’:4 The student protest movement is to a large extent an expression of the social and political extremism with which we have increasingly come to live everywhere else in society. Much of it flows from the rapidly spreading taste for (and rising returns in) terror and myth-making, best developed among those addicted to a disregard of lawful conventions as a means of protest against the intrinsic nature of constitutional government.5

Keywords: Political Economy; External Cost; Unanimity Rule; Debt Finance; Institutional Failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1990
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-349-10519-9_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349105199

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10519-9_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().