Abstract
This article discusses the methodological foundations of Buchanan’s constitutional political economy. We argue that Buchanan is a constitutional economist because he is an economist or a political economist. In other words, Buchanan is a constitutional economist—he insists on the necessity of focusing on constitutions and to analyze the “rules of the social game”—because he defines economics as a science of exchange. Buchanan’s definition of economics is not only specific, it is also opposed to the definition of economics that other economists retain and, above all, opposed to the definition of economics that many public choice theorists use. The latter have, in effect, adopted the Robbins 1932 definition of economics as a science of choice that Buchanan criticizes and rejects. Buchanan’s constitutional economics can be a branch of public choice only under certain conditions.
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Notes
Note that the official document justifies the award in quite different terms, namely “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making”.
See also, Buchanan 1969a, b, p. 1030; 1975, p. 225; 1991, for other similar statements.
One must not forget that, when he presents for the first time his views on economics-as-exchange, in 1964, Buchanan explicitly opposes his definition to Robbins definition. He thus explicitly designates Robbins as his target: “I propose to take on Lord Robbins as an adversary” (Buchanan 1964, p. 214; emphasis added), who is criticized for having taken economics in the wrong direction: “his all too persuasive definition of our subject field has served to retard, rather than to advance, scientific progress” (1964, p. 214); then, and as a consequence, the rest of (or, at least, almost all) economists, who are blamed for having almost unanimously adopted his definition of economics: “the Robbins statement of the definition of the economic problem… has found its way into almost all of our textbooks … Only since The Nature and Significance of Economic Science have economists so exclusively devoted energies to the problems raised by scarcity, broadly considered, and to the necessity for the making of the allocative decisions” (1964, p. 214; emphasis added).
In 1981, Robbins refers to economics as the “science of Catallactics … or the Science of Exchange (1981, pp. 1–2) but mentions “his old friend and colleague, Fritz Hayek” and also Whately but does not refer to Buchanan, one of the very rare who explicitly criticises Robbins.
Buchanan distinguishes between “behavior” and “choice” (1969c, p. 40, 42).
See also, “[o]nce we become methodologically trapped in the maximization paradigm, economics becomes applied mathematics or engineering”, (Buchanan 1976, p. 82).
Black uses the capital letters to designate the science by comparison to the phenomena.
This is the criticism raised by Downs: “Black restricts himself to analyzing how committees operate internally; therefore, he has written only half a general theory of committees” (1959, p. 212).
This has, to our knowledge, rarely been stressed; for a notable exception see Levy (1997).
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the University of Hamburg (Adam Smith seminar of the Institute for Socio-Economics), at the First world meeting of the Public Choice societies, and at the 2007 Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought (GMU). I acknowlege the support of the ICER and the Dipartimiento d’Economia of the Università degli Studi di Torino. I thank Philippe Fontaine, Sophie Harnay, Randall G. Holcombe, Manfred Holler, Alan Lockard and Pierre Salmon for comments on a preliminary version. The research for this paper was supported by different grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Marciano, A. Buchanan’s constitutional political economy: exchange vs. choice in economics and in politics. Const Polit Econ 20, 42–56 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-008-9048-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-008-9048-2