The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, vol. 7 (The Limits of Liberty)
Vol. 7 of The Collected Works. Published originally in 1975, The Limits of Liberty made James Buchanan’s name more widely known than ever before among political philosophers and theorists and established Buchanan, along with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, as one of the three new contractarians, standing on the shoulders of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. Buchanan frames the central idea most cogently in the opening of his preface: “Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a society of men and women who want to be free but who recognize the inherent limits that social interdependence places on them.”
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The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Foreword by Harmut Kliemt, 20 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999-2002). Vol. 7 The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan.
Copyright:
Foreword © 2000 Liberty Fund, Inc. The Limits of Liberty, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock © 1975 by The University of Chicago.
People:
- Author: James M. Buchanan
- Foreword: Hartmut Kliemt
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| EBook PDF | This text-based PDF or EBook was created from the HTML version of this book and is part of the Portable Library of Liberty. | 806 KB |
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Table of Contents
- CONTENTS
- Foreword
- Preface
- The Limits of Liberty
- 1.: Commencement
- The Anarchist Utopia
- The Calculus of Consent
- The Origin of Property
- Equal Treatment for Unequals
- Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
- God, Man, and the Good Society
- 3.: The Bases for Freedom in Society
- Commonality and Noneconomic Interaction
- Rights and Contract
- The “Natural Distribution”
- The Emergence of Property
- Violations of Contract
- Two-Stage Contract
- From Small to Large Numbers
- 3.: Postconstitutional Contract: The Theory of Public Goods
- Market Failure and the Free-Rider Problem
- Exchange and Unanimity
- Unanimity, Voluntarism, and Exclusion
- Individual Rights under Nonunanimity Rules
- Indirect contract under less-than-unanimity decision rules
- Unconstrained departures from unanimity rules
- Allocation and Distribution
- 4.: Constitutional Contract: The Theory of Law
- Personal Inequality
- Anarchistic Interaction
- Disarmament and the Emergence of Property Rights
- Conquest, Slavery, and Contract
- Trading Equilibrium and Direct Production
- Defection and Enforcement
- The Protective State and the Productive State
- Rules as Indirect Rights
- The Constitutional Mix
- 5.: Continuing Contract and the Status Quo
- The Ethics and Economics of Contractual Obligation
- Contractual Changes in the Status Quo
- Imposed Changes in Constitutional Rights
- Prior Violations and the Status Quo
- Specification of Rights in the Status Quo
- 6.: The Paradox of “Being Governed”
- Man as Rule-Maker
- The Protective State as Outside Referee
- The Productive State as Embodied in Postconstitutional Contract
- Experts and Democracy
- Personal Loss Functions and Procedural Norms
- Enforcement of Putative Contract
- Enforcer’s Encroachment on the Contractual Domain
- 7.: Law as Public Capital
- Law and Public Goods
- The Benefits and Costs of Law
- Agreement on Constitutional Change
- Formal and Informal Law: The Role of Ethics
- The Generation of “Public Bad”
- Legal Structure as Public Capital
- Law Reform and the Status Quo
- 8.: The Punishment Dilemma
- The Cost of Punishment
- The Time Dimension of Punishment
- The Strategic or Constitutional Dimension of Punishment
- The generality of punishment rules
- Public Choice of Punishment
- Public Choice of General Rules
- 9.: The Threat of Leviathan
- Wicksellian Unanimity
- Majority Voting under Benefit-Cost Constraints
- Majority Voting without Benefit-Cost Constraints
- Logrolling and minority benefits
- Political Income, Bureaucratic Rents, and Franchise
- Politicians’ preferences and budgetary bias
- Bureaucratic rents and franchise
- Democracy Unchained
- Beyond Constitutional Boundaries
- 10.: Beyond Pragmatism: Prospects for Constitutional Revolution
- Institutional-Constitutional Change and Pragmatic Policy Response
- Confusion and Challenge
- Intellectual Bankruptcy
- The Contractarian Revival
- Political and Public Philosophy
- Individual Rights in Democracy
- The Creation of Rights
- Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography