James Buchanan

James Buchanan (1919-2013) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for his synthesis of market economics and political democracy. A libertarian, a contractarian, a constitutionalist, Buchanan saw the social world as a network of individuals revealing preferences and negotiating exchanges. Self-interest that might otherwise have led to the war of each against all is channelled into the division of labour and capitalism by consent.
Trade gives rational individuals the opportunity to increase each other's felt well-being. Gain-seeking anarchy is the economist's utopia but still a protective State is needed to ensure that agreements are honoured and the rules obeyed. Buchanan made himself a missionary for binding agreements and good rules. Without them, he warned, we would surely fight.
Using morals when other economists used mathematics, Buchanan argued a market economist's case for tolerance of diversity, unanimity of consensus and uncompromising respect. This book, James Buchanan, seeks to explain and evaluate the thought-provoking insights of a prolific and original thinker who enriched the ethical aspirations of a frequently dismal science.

David Reisman is Professor of Economics at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Surrey, UK.

1.Introduction
2.Individuals and Agreements
2.1.The Individual
2.2.The Truth Judgment
2.3.Truth as Consensus
2.4.Economic Psychology
2.5.The Agreement
3.Rules without Regulators
3.1.The Social Individual
3.2.Non-Conflictual Conventions
3.3.Group Size: Large and Small
3.4.Work and Saving: Ethics as an External Benefit
4.Social Justice: Buchanan and Rawls
4.1.Justice as Consent
4.2.Buchanan and Rawls
4.3.The First Principle
4.4.The Second Principle
5.Social Evolution: Buchanan and Hayek
5.1.Market as Discovery
5.2.Conventions and Heuristics
5.3.The Visible Hand
6.Acts and Rules
6.1.Conservatives and Libertarians
6.2.Buchanan as an Anarchist
6.3.When East went West
7.Constitutional Rules
7.1.The Calculus of Consent
7.2.The Original Contract
7.3.Unanimity of Consent
7.4.Unanimity and Unknowledge
7.5.Collective Regulation: The Citizen and the State
7.6.Updating the Constitution
8.Operational Rules
8.1.Percentages and Externalities
8.2.The Tyranny of the Majority
8.3.Pareto Optimality
9.The Microeconomics of Consent
9.1.Vote-Selling
9.2.Vote-Trading
10.Moral Anarchy
10.1.Things Fall Apart
10.2.External Costs
10.3.Politicians
10.4.Bureaucrats
11.Keynesian Ethics
11.1.Democracy without Consultation
11.2.The Politics of the Deficit
11.3.Debt: Objective and Subjective
11.4.Inflation
11.5.Macroeconomic Management
12.Ethics as Unknowledge
12.1.Agreement is All
12.2.The Fear Motive
13.Economics as Unknowledge
13.1.The Mission of the Economist
13.2.The Subjectivist Heritage
13.3.Buchanan as a Subjectivist
14.Macroeconomic Policy
14.1.Fiscal Policy
14.2.Monetary Policy
15.Microeconomic Policy
15.1.The Minimal State
15.2.The Protective State
15.3.The Productive State
15.4.The Transfer State
16.Buchanan's Legacy