J. M. Buchanan’s contractarian constitutionalism: political economy for democratic society

Buchanan (2001d [1992b], p. 50) wrote “I have, of course been pleased by the emergence of the appellation ‘Virginia’ or ‘Virginian’ applied or assigned to the particular research program in political economy with which I have been associated at three separate universities in the commonwealth, and over a period of more than three decades.”

Looking back at the Fullbright year 1955–1956 he spent in Italy, Buchanan (2001d [1992c], p. 37) mentions the “Italian perspective on politics” he had studied: “This perspective has much in common with eighteenth-century conceptions from which emerged both the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment and those of the American Founding Fathers. After Italy, I was prepared, intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally, to join in an entrepreneurial venture with my Virginia colleague Warren Nutter, a venture aimed at bringing renewed emphasis to ‘political economy’ in its classical sense.”

Buchanan (1958, p. 5): “The Thomas Jefferson Center strives to carry on the honorable tradition of ‘political economy’—the study of what makes for a ‘good society.’ Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discussions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed economic policy measures” (quoted from Boettke and Marciano 2015, p. 55).

Buchanan (2001d [1992b], p. 56): “(T)he predominant emphasis of the theoretical welfare economics of the 1950s and 1960s was placed on the identification of ‘market failure’, with the accompanying normative argument for politicized correction. In retrospect, it seems naïve in the extreme to advance institutional comparisons between the workings of an observed and an idealized alternative.”

Buchanan (2001b [1982], pp. 41, 54): “‘Science‘, in a narrowly defined sense that is descriptive of the ‘hard-science’ disciplines, is explicitly positive.… By more or less natural presumption, ‘science’ is valued because it is precursory to its usefulness in control. Physics, as a positive science is antecedent to the miracle of modern technology.… In the ultimate sense, this science [political economy], too finds its normative purpose in control, that which is exercised upon our behavior by the selection of the institutional–constitutional constraints within which we interact one with another.”

Buchanan (2001d [1992b], p. 59): “From the early 1970s, public choice, defined comprehensively, came to embody two separate and distinct research programs. The first, constitutional economics, finds its precursor in the work of Wicksell and its modern representatives in those of Vining, Buchanan, Wagner, Brennan and Vanberg. And … my own emphasis has been almost exclusively limited to this program. The second research program within public choice falls more appropriately under the rubric “the economic theory of politics” and involves the extension of Homo economicus to behavior under observed institutional rules.”

Buchanan (2001a [1987a], p. 6): “Classical political economy emerged from moral philosophy, and its proponents considered their efforts to fall naturally within the limits of philosophical discourse. As a modern embodiment, Constitutional Economics is similarly located, regardless of disciplinary fragmentation. How can persons live together in liberty, peace, and prosperity? This central question of social philosophy requires continuing contributions from many specialists in inquiry, surely including those of the constitutional economist.”

Buchanan (1999a [1986b], p. 455 f.): “One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell’s unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago’s old Harper Library. Only the immediate post-dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own dramatic example of learning by serendipity.”

A translation of this chapter, prepared by Buchanan, was published 10 years after the discovery (Wicksell 1958 [1896]).

In a review of Buchanan’s (1999d [1968]) The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, Head (1970, p. 121) notes that “More than any other fiscal theorist over the postwar period, Buchanan has helped us to view fiscal phenomena, as he himself puts it ‘through a different window’. This book represents in many respects the cumulation of these efforts”.

Buchanan (1999a [1986a], p. 15): “The effect on me was dramatic. Wicksell laid out before me a set of ideas that seemed to correspond precisely with those that I had already in my head, ideas that I could not have expressed and would not have dared to express in the public-finance mindset of the time.”

Buchanan (2001d [1988], p. 140): “Wicksell suggested that if improvements in fiscal outcomes are desired the advising economist should concentrate attention on the structure of the political decision process, on the incentives that were faced by legislators who are ultimately responsible, electorally, to their constituencies.”

Buchanan (2000d [1975], p. 6 f.): “Wicksell admonished economists for their failure to recognize the elementary fact that collective or public-sector decisions emerge from a political process rather than from the mind of some benevolent despot.”

Buchanan (2001a [1987b], p. 71): “Wicksell sought to extend the range of economic analysis of resource use to the public or governmental sector. He sought a criterion for efficiency in the state or collective use of resources that was comparable to the criterion that had been formally specified for the use of resources in the market sector of the economy. In determining the value of the collective use of a resource, Wicksell adhered to the basic individualistic postulate of market exchange: individuals, who both enjoy the benefits of state financed services and pay the costs of sacrificed privately supplied goods, are the only legitimate judge of their own well-being. From this individualistic presupposition, there emerged the Wicksellian unanimity criterion.”

Wicksell (1958 [1896], p. 90): “In the final analysis, unanimity and fully voluntary consent in the making of decisions provide the only certain and palpable guarantee against injustice in tax distribution.” Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1980], p. 9 f.): “Knut Wicksell was the first to recognize the importance of the unanimity rule as an idealized benchmark—since it would be necessary to ensure that all governmental actions represented genuine improvements (or at least no damage) for all persons, measured by the preferences of the individuals themselves. Only through general agreement could the preferences of citizens be revealed; there is no other way of ‘adding up’ the individual evaluations….”

Buchanan (2001d [1988], p. 141): “Wicksell’s objective was to construct a criterion for efficiency in fiscal decisions, by which he meant the satisfaction of the demands of individuals, as consumers of collectively financed goods and services, analogous to the satisfaction of consumer demands in the competitive market for private goods and services. In Hutt’s later terminology, Wicksell was seeking to establish institutional requirements that would ensure that the principle of consumers’ sovereignty is met through governmental provision of goods and services, alongside the operation of the market or private sector.”

Buchanan (1991 [1989a], p. 29): “I am a methodological and normative individualist”; Buchanan (2001a [1987a], p. 9): “Methodological individualism… is almost universally accepted by economists who work within mainstream… traditions. A philosophical complement of this position that assumes a central role in Constitutional Economics is much less widely accepted and is often explicitly rejected. A distinction must be drawn between the methodological individualism that builds on individual choice as the basic unit of analysis and a second presupposition that locates the ultimate sources of value exclusively in individuals. The single most important precursor to Constitutional Economics in its modern variant is Knut Wicksell, who was an individualist in both of the senses discussed above.”

Buchanan (2001d [1992a], p. 23): “I shall acknowledge that I work always within a self-imposed constraint that some may choose to call a normative one. I have no interest in structures of social interaction that are non-individualist…. The individualist element in my vision of social reality, actual or potential, has been an important element of my substantive criticism of the work of others in political economy.”

Buchanan (2001a [1987]a, p. 8f.): “Only individuals choose and act. Collectivities, as such, neither choose nor act, and analysis that proceeds as if they do is not within the accepted scientific canon. Social aggregates are considered only as the results of choices made and actions taken by individuals…. An aggregative result that is observed but which cannot, somehow, be factored down and explained by the choices of individuals stands as a challenge to the scholar rather than as some demonstration of non-individualistic organic unity.”

Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1985], p. 25f.): “The critical normative presupposition on which the whole contractarian construction stands or falls is the location of value exclusively in the individual human being. The individual is the unique unit of consciousness from which all evaluation begins….There is no external source of evaluation.”

Buchanan (2000b [1987], p. 125): “‘Social value’, as such carries no ethical weight. A system must be ethically judged… exclusively in terms of its ability to allow individuals to further their own values, whatever they may be.”

Buchanan (1999a [1959], p. 208): “Since ‘social’ values do not exist apart from individual values in a free society, consensus or unanimity (mutuality of gain) is the only test which can ensure that a change is beneficial.”

Musgrave (1939, p. 220): “The contention that fiscal policy in the modern community—democratic or authoritarian—is determined as a direct resultant of the mutual agreement of a multitude of contributors, acceptable to each and all of them, at best constitutes an unacceptable simplification of the highly intricate political process through which collective decisions are arrived at.”

Buchanan (2001a [1987a], p. 10): “If only individual evaluations are to count, and if the only source of information about such evaluations is the revealed choice behavior of individuals themselves, then no change could be assessed to be ‘efficient’ until and unless some means could be worked out as to bring all persons (and groups) into agreement. If no such scheme can be arranged, the observing political economist remains silent.”

Buchanan (1999c [1967], p. 116): “Wicksell recognized that unanimity would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, and he did modify this requirement to one of ‘relative unanimity’ when he came to discuss implementation of this schemes. He did not, however, abandon his basic notion, which is surely correct, that unanimity provides the only criterion to ensure that expenditure proposals are really worth making, ‘worth’ being measured in terms of individual evaluations.”

Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998], p. 22): “And, of course, for any collective action project that promises to yield a net surplus, there may exist many possible cost-sharing schemes. Recognition of the differential distributional gains from implementation of the action provides the motivation for separate bargaining strategies that may make ultimate agreement difficult to secure. Participants may find it privately rational to invest in strategy aimed at decreasing cost shares while they may acknowledge the mutuality of gain that agreement might make possible.”

Buchanan (1999c [1967], p. 116f.): “The ultimate validity of the unanimity criterion can be accepted without the implication that either full or relative unanimity should be the rule for the making of day-to-day fiscal choices. At the level of ‘constitutional’ decision, where the alternatives are the various possible rules for making ordinary decisions for the group, it may be recognized and predicted that the costs of reaching each separate decision through a unanimity rule may be intolerably high and that some acceptance of ‘inefficient’ results in particular instances seems warranted.”

In his review essay on Buchanan’s (1999d [1968]) The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, J.G. Head (1970, p. 117), after calling it “impossible to accept Buchanan’s contention… that Wicksellian consensus can usefully be regarded a political ‘ideal’”, notes in reference to the constitutionalist argument in The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1999 [1962]) that, “With this argument, perhaps the major traditional objection to voluntary exchange theory is effectively undermined.”

Holcombe (2018, p. 582): “One challenge facing Buchanan’s constitutional project is reconciling the coercive nature of government with his politics as agreement framework.”

Buchanan (1999a [1986b], p. 463): “Politics as observed remains, of course, far from the idealized collective-cooperative exchange that the unanimity rule would implement…. But barriers to realization of the ideal do not imply rejection of the benchmark definition of the ideal.”

Buchanan (1991 [1989b], p. 39): “How can we even begin to explain political reality by an exchange model?… Conflict, coercion… do indeed characterize political institutions, as they may be observed to operate within a set of constitutional rules…. But if analysis and attention is shifted to the level of rules, among which choices are possible, we can use potential and actual agreement among persons on these rules as the criterion of normative legitimacy.”

Buchanan (1999a [1990], p. 381): “(T)he choice of reciprocally binding constraints by individuals who are related one to another in an anticipated interaction becomes fully analogous to trade in ordinary goods and services”.

Buchanan (1999b [1962], p. 319): “The contract theory of the State can be interpreted as… an attempt to derive a logic of collective action from an analysis of individual choice. Since our own efforts embody both of these elements, it follows that our work falls within the broadly defined limits of the contractarian tradition.” Buchanan (1999a [1986b], p. 24): “The Wicksellian extension of the exchange paradigm to the many-person collective… when applied to the choices among political rules… merges into political philosophy, and the exchange paradigm becomes a natural component of a general contractarian theory of political interaction. Almost by definition, the economist who shifts his attention to political process while retaining his methodological individualism must be contractarian.”

Buchanan (1999a [1990], p. 388f.): “[W]ithin the tradition of contractarian political philosophy… attempts were made to ground justificatory argument for state coercion on agreement by those individuals who are subject to coercion….The assignment to the individual of a capacity for rational independent choice, as such, allowed… a science that embodied a legitimatizing explanation for the emergence of and existence of the state. In agreeing to be governed, explicitly or implicitly, the individual exchanges his own liberty with others who similarly give up liberties in exchange for the benefits offered by a regime characterized by behavioral limits.”

Buchanan (2001a [1977], p. 15): “I am a constitutionalist and a contractarian: Constitutionalist in the sense that the rules of order are, and must be, selected at a different level and via a different process than the decisions made within those rules, a contractarian in the sense that I believe that conceptual agreement among individuals provides the only benchmark against which to evaluate observed rules and actions within those rules.”

In one of his very first publications, Buchanan (2001c [1950], p. 8) advocates a principle of fiscal equity of which he says: “it is essential as a guide to the operation of a liberal democratic society, stemming from the same base as the principle of equality of individuals before the law.”

Buchanan and Tullock (1999 [1962], p. 11): “[W]e propose to construct a theory of collective choice that has relevance to modern Western democracy.” Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1983], p. 150): “[O]ur attention is limited to democratic polities”. Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998], p. 3): “Our concern in this book is exclusively with those structures of social order that qualify as ‘democratic’”.

Buchanan (1999a [1976], p. 147): “In my view, and it is one that I think was shared by Wicksell, the exchange-contractarian paradigm is the only one that is wholly consistent with what we may legitimately call ‘democracy’ or with a social order that embodies ‘democratic values’.” Buchanan (2001b [1985b], p. 267): “The first and most critical presupposition that provides a foundation for any genuine democratic theory is that which locates sources of value exclusively in individuals.”

Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1988], p. 87): “The public choice theorist does not envisage his ‘science’ as offering a base for ‘preaching to the players’ on how to maximize welfare functions. His task is not the Machiavellian one of advising governors, directly or indirectly, on how they ought to behave. His task is that of advising all citizens on the working of alternative constitutional rules.”

As Buchanan (1999a [1991], p. 288f.) put it in concluding his Nobel Prize Lecture, “If individuals are considered the ultimate sovereigns, it follows directly that they are the addresses of all proposals and arguments concerning constitutional-institutional issues. Arguments that involve reliance on experts in certain areas of choice must be addressed to individuals, as sovereigns, and it is individuals’ choice in deferring to expert-agents that legitimize the potential role of the latter, not some external assessment of epistemic competence as such.”

Holcombe (2018, p. 597) repeats in various iterations the claim that Buchanan’s project is “focused heavily on identifying… rules which citizens would, under hypothetical conditions, agree with.”

Holcombe (2018, pp. 591, 599): “Buchanan objects to the neoclassical welfare economics approach that (often implicitly) assumes that policy decisions will be made by an omniscient benevolent despot, but the same objection could be raised toward constitutional rules that might be approved in a hypothetical unanimous agreement…. Just as there is no omniscient benevolent despot who is able to implement Pareto-optimal policies there also is no omniscient benevolent despot who is able to identify and implement policies to which everyone would agree under hypothetical circumstances.”

Holcombe (2018, p. 591): “Buchanan’s benchmark of hypothetical agreement is at odds with the public choice methodology. Public choice analyzes actual collective decision-making processes rather than hypothetical ideal processes that have no real-world parallel.”

In that “public choice spirit”, Holcombe (2018, p. 594) emphasizes that “A public choice approach to constitutional decision-making recognizes that actual constitutional rules are not unanimously approved; they are designed by an elite few who bargain with each other to design the rules for their benefit…. Public choice clearly recognizes that public policy often benefits some at the expense of others.”

Buchanan and Tullock (1999 [1962], p. 13): “Were it not for the properly grounded fear that political processes may be used for exploitative purposes, there would be little meaning and less purpose to constitutional restrictions.”

Buchanan (2003, p. 153): “The constitutional way of thinking must emerge from a faith, of sorts, that political order can be so constructed as to yield mutual benefits to all participants, in other words, that the political game is positive rather than zero or negative-sum.”

Holcombe (2018, p. 594): “The first step in a public choice analysis of constitutional decision-making is to recognize that constitutional rules can never be agreed to by everyone who is subject to them except when the size of the group is very small.”

In private voluntary associations, agreement to the constitution can be inferred from members’ voluntary decisions to join and to remain in the organization. In the case of polities, as inter-generational organizations, that is true only for those who voluntarily adopt citizenship and thereby explicitly express their consent to the constitution. For the vast majority who typically are born into citizenship, no equivalent indicator for voluntary consent can be found. See on this issue Vanberg (2007, p. 111).

Holcombe (2018, p. 583): Buchanan’s “constitutional project, which rests on the norm of agreement, could conflict with his classical liberal views that rest on the norm of freeing individuals form the coercive power of others.”

von Mises (1949, p. 193): “Democracy guarantees a system of government in accordance with the wishes and plans of the majority. But it cannot prevent majorities from falling victim to erroneous ideas and from adopting inappropriate policies which not only fail to realize the ends aimed at but result in disaster. Majorities too may err and destroy our civilization. The good cause will not triumph merely on account of its reasonableness and expediency.” von Mises (1985, p. 68): “Governments must be forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people.”

Hayek (1960, p. 115): “The principles that plead for the limitation of the power of the majority are not proved wrong if democracy disregards them, nor is democracy proved undesirable if it makes what the liberal must regard as the wrong decision. He simply believes that he has an argument which, when properly understood, will induce the majority to limit the exercise of its own powers and which he hopes it can be persuaded to accept as a guide when deciding on particular issues.”

Buchanan (2001d [1993], p. 274): “The range of necessary political decisions on economic matters is dramatically reduced in a polity that gives a predominant place to a market or enterprise economy.”

Buchanan (2001c [1995], p. 69): “The potential for the exercise of individual liberty is directly related to the relative size of the market sector in an economy. A market organization does not, however, emerge spontaneously from some imagined state of nature. A market economy must, in one sense, be ‘laid on’ through the design, construction, and implementation of a political-legal framework (i.e., an inclusive constitution) that protects property and enforces voluntary contracts.” That classical liberal consensus is not shared by advocates of what Buchanan (2001a [1989], p. 244) calls the “romantic ideal of laissez-faire, the fictional image of the anarcho-capitalists.”

Rothbard (1956, p. 250; emphasis in original?) implies the opposite claim when he argues that “The free market is the name for the array of all voluntary exchanges that take place in the world. Since every exchange demonstrates a unanimity of benefit for both parties concerned, we must conclude that the free market benefits all its participants.”

Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998], p. 20f.): “What should an idealized politics do in a community described by adherence to traditional liberal values, including the exclusive location of evaluation in the consciousness of those who are participants…. If the sources of evaluation are located only in the consciousness of persons, and are known only by persons themselves, any legitimacy of coercion must be derived ultimately from voluntary consent, whether actually or tacitly given. The direct implication of normative individualism… is that the idealized politics must reflect contractarian foundations.”

Buchanan (2003, p. 154) speaks of “the implied presumption that the basic rules must embody a generalized public consensus, without which a liberal social order cannot long survive.”

Buchanan (2001b [1985b], p. 271): “Politics, inclusively defined, involves the whole set of activities in which separate persons participate as a collective body or organization. That is to say, politics and governance involve the determination of rules, institutional structure, and particular outcomes that are to be applied to all persons in the collective. There is, by definition, a single political choice among relevant alternatives that are confronted. In the terminology of modern economics, politics, by definition, involves ‘publicness’, whether ‘public good’ or ‘public bad’…. Because of the possible conflict among separate individual interests and values, any political decision must override at least some of those who participate in the process. Nominal political equality insures only that all persons may participate equally in the ultimate choices to be made.”

Buchanan (1995/96, p. 267f.): “What is the ultimate maximand when the individual considers the organization of the political structure?… [T]his maximand cannot be summarized as the maximation of (equal) individual liberty from political-collective action…. A more meaningful maximand is summarized as the maximation of (equal) individual sovereignty.”

Buchanan has characterized his critique of the welfarist-social choice approach as involving “an extension of some of Wicksell’s ideas on fiscal theory to modern welfare economics” (1999a ([1959], p. 192).—For a detailed comparison and contrast between, on the one side, welfare economics and social choice theory and, on the other side, Buchanan’s contractarian constitutionalism, see Vanberg (2019).

See, e.g., Vanberg (2005, p. 10ff.; 2019, p. xixff.).

Buchanan (1999a [1954], p. 90): Arrow “defines the social welfare function as a process or rule which, for each set of individual orderings… states a corresponding social ordering”.

Buchanan (1999a [1959], p. 193f.): “Welfare economists, new and old, have generally assumed omniscience in the observer…. The observing economist is considered to be able to ‘read’ individual preference functions. Thus, even though an ‘increase in welfare’ for an individual is defined as ‘that which he chooses’, the economist can unambiguously distinguish an increase in welfare independent of individual behavior because he can accurately predict what the individual would, in fact, ‘choose’ if confronted with the alternatives under consideration.”

Buchanan (2001d [1988], p. 138): “The allocationist economist defines an individual strictly in terms of a preference or utility function…. In this analytical construction, efficiency or optimality in resource use is defined in terms of individual values, but these values are ‘disembodied’.”

Buchanan (2003, p. 150f.): “Economists have tried… to remain methodological individualists while straining to extend their maximizing calculus to non-individualistic entities…. Because of the individualized building blocks, the economists have been forced into the sometimes tortuous searches for nonexistent social welfare functions.”

Buchanan (1999a [1959], p. 203): “This central feature of the approach seems… to be contrary to the presuppositions of a free society. The function may be useful as a device in assisting the decision-making of a despot, benevolent or otherwise, an organic state, or a single-minded ruling group.”

Buchanan (1999a [1959], p. 204): “Whereas the ‘social welfare function’ approach searches for a criterion independent of the choice process itself…, the alternative approach evaluates results only in terms of the choice process itself.”

Buchanan (2001c [1986], p. 322): “Instead, ‘efficiency’ is defined as ‘that which tends to emerge from voluntary agreement among persons in the relevant group’. This definition becomes the only possible unless it is presumed that the subjective evaluation of individuals is objectively known to external observers or that the evaluations relevant to efficiency are to be divorced from individual evaluations altogether.”

Buchanan (1999a [1959], p. 195). “The political economist is often conceived as being able to recommend policy A over policy B. If… no objective social criterion exists, the economist qua scientist is unable to recommend.”

See, e.g., G. Vanberg (2017), Munger (2018), Fleury and Marciano (2018) and Magness et al. (2018).

MacLean (2017, p. 226) deplores “inbuilt ‘majority constraining’ obstacles” in the US Constitution and “features of the U.S. system [that] further obstruct majority rule.”

MacLean (2017, p. xxiii): “Buchanan’s analysis of how the rules of government might be altered so officials could not act on the will of the majority became ‘constitutional economics’”. On “Buchanan’s call for constitutional revolution” MacLean (ibid., p. 227) comments that “it would be all but impossible for government to respond to the will of the majority.”

In a letter to Buchanan in which he refers to the critique of unconstrained majority rule in The Calculus of Consent, John Rawls notes: “I agree that majority rule is just a rule to be adopted on rational grounds like any other, given experience with it. Majority rule as a principle of justice I agree is absent. On my view the principles of justice put constraints in the constitution, & on all political majorities; and majority rule is rational only where it can be supposed that majorities will limit themselves by the principles of justice” (quoted in Levy and Peart 2018, p. 180).

In reference to The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan (1999a [1997], p. 421) notes that “In a sense, our book might have been interpreted as a criticism of majority rule or majoritarianism”.

Buchanan (1999a [1997], p. 421): “(M)ajority rule is equated in public attitudes with democracy.” Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998], p. 23f.): “In popular as well as in professional discourse, democratic politics is associated directly with majority rule.”

In a similar spirit, John Rawls (1971, p. 84) speaks of democratic politics as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” and describes democratic citizenship as “a relation of free and equal citizens who exercise ultimate political power as a collective body” (Rawls 1999 [1997], p. 577).

Buchanan (2001a [1986], p. 215): “If politics is to be interpreted in any justificatory or legitimizing sense without the introduction of supra-individual value norms, it must be modelled as a process within which individuals, with separate and potentially differing interests and values, interact for the purpose of securing individually valued benefits of cooperative effort. If this presupposition about the nature of politics is accepted, the ultimate model of politics is contractarian. There is simply no feasible alternative.” MacLean (2017, p. 97) characterizes Buchanan’s contractarianism as “hyper-individualistic”.

Buchanan (2001a [1986], p. 220f.): “As we move to the constitutional stage,… there is no place for majority rule or, indeed, for any rule short of unanimity…. If politics… is modelled as the cooperative effort of individuals to further or advance their own interests and values, which only they, as individuals, know, it is evident that all persons must be brought into agreement.”

MacLean (2017, p. 152) cites Samuels (1976) in support of her verdict on Buchanan’s work. One must, though, ascribe to Samuels (1976, p. 937) the same misreading of Buchanan’s argument when he posits: “Buchanan does not merely indicate problems with democracy and majoritarian decision; rather, his analysis strikes at the heart of self-government. In order ostensibly to limit government… Buchanan denigrates self-government (democracy)…. [H]is analysis is dangerous: Its logical conclusion is the destruction of self-government.” Given Buchanan’s central premise that only the subjective evaluations of the individual citizens, and not any external criteria, provide the normative standard of judging policy issues, it strikes one as strange to read in Samuels’s (ibid.) review: “Buchanan fails to accept the predicament of self-government, that government is internal and not external…. Does not the very notion of self-government require the dismissal of all pretense of such absolutes and externals?”.

Brennan and Buchanan (2000 [1985], p. 26): “If the individual is presupposed to be the only source of value, a question arises concerning identification. Which individuals are to be considered sources of value? There is no apparent means of discriminating among persons in the relevant community, and there would seem to be no logical reason to seek to establish such discrimination if it were possible. Consistency requires that all persons be treated as moral equivalents, as individuals equally capable of expressing evaluations among relevant options.” Also see Buchanan (1999c [1967], pp. 4, 174; 2001a [1986], p. 221; 2001b [1985b], p. 271) and Buchanan and Congleton (2003 [1998], p. 4).

Buchanan (2001b [1985b], p. 273): “Democracy, defined as a process that allows equal expression of separate individual values in choices that are necessarily mutually exclusive and that necessarily generate results applicable to all members of the polity, may be severely limited in scope and range. Such limitation is a mark of the political ‘success’ of the social interaction process, inclusively considered, rather than the opposite.” Furthermore, “the term ‘constitutional’ must be prefixed to the term ‘democracy’ if the latter is to be sustainable in an internally consistent normative argument…. ‘(D)emocracy’ assumes evaluative significance only under the presupposition… that effective political equality, which is the operative principle of democracy, can be meaningfully secured only if the range and scope of collective political action are constrained or limited by constitutional boundaries.” (ibid., p. 266f.)

The British political theorist Bernard Crick has published extensively on citizenship as an educational task in democratic society. See, e.g., Crick (2000, 2007).

Buchanan (1999a [1979], p. 255): “The American Experience, perhaps unique in history, has embodied the attitude that we create the institutions within in which we interact, one with another, that we construct the rules that define the game that we all must play. But we can never lose sight of the elementary fact that the selection of the rules, ‘constitutional choice,’ is of a different attitudinal dimension from the selection of strategies within defined rules.”