Search results

AbstractRejecting all knowledge claims concerning right and wrong in matters practical James Buchanan concurred with legal positivism that invalid law cannot be identified by its substantive content but only by an inherited defect in its factual creation. Beyond correct creation Buchanan proposed as a quasi-natural law constraint that unanimity in the shadow of individual veto power must at least be conceivable if a norm is to be law. The emerging hybrid conception of constitutional law is symptomatic for Buchanan's never-ending but ultimately futile efforts to incorporate Kantian ideals of interpersonal respect into constitutional economics without imposing them as personal values.

Abstract
Classifying accounts of institutionalized social norms that rely on individual rule-following as 'sociological' and accounts based on individual opportunity-seeking behavior as 'economic', the paper rejects purely economic accounts on theoretical grounds. Explaining the realworkings of institutionalized social norms and social order exclusively in terms of self-regarding opportunityseeking individual behavior is impossible. An integrated sociological approach to the so-called Hobbesian problem of social order that incorporates opportunityseeking along with rule-following behavior is necessary. Such an approach emerges on the horizon if economic methods are put to good sociological use on the basis of recent experimental economic findings on rule-following behavior.

Abstract
A universalist conception of immigration, assuming that all humans have a fundamental ethical right to equal consideration (Brücker), is contrasted with a particularist ethical conception that restricts equal consideration to members of a given community (Osterloh/Frey). It is argued that within the limits of Robbinsian economics only a communitarian conception is acceptable while an ethical theorist might lean towards a universalist view.

Abstract
The increasingly wide spread use of RCM, rational choice modeling, and RCT, rational choice theory, in disciplines like economics, law, ethics, psychology, sociology, political science, management facilitates interdisciplinary exchange. This is a great achievement. Yet it nurtures the hope that a unified account of rational (inter-)active choice making might arise from 'reason' in (a priori) terms of intuitively appealing axioms. Such 'rationalist' characterizations of rational choice neglect real human practices and empirical accounts of those practices. This is theoretically misleading and practically dangerous. Searching for a wide reflective equilibrium, WRE, on RCT in evidence-oriented ways can explicate 'rational' without rationalism.

In his seminal book The State ([19851] 1998) Anthony de Jasay draws attention to the anomaly that a minimal state would have to devote its coercive power to no other purpose than to keep itself minimal. Once a state exists, those in control of its fundamental coercive power will use it for their particular redistributive purposes and go beyond the minimum redistribution necessary to maintain the minimal state. Within a politically realist perspective, neither anarchy nor the minimal state forms a stable equilibrium of social interaction. Nevertheless, Jasay prefers anarchy to a minimal state as an ideal. The worst atrocities in human history have been committed by states. In view of the risks brought about by founding a state, anarchy may be seen as a mortally justified hedge of bets: the best and the worst results of human organization are prevented. Adapted from the source document.

James M. Buchanan was a contractarian. The author is not. But he shares Buchanan's classical-liberal ideals. In his account of what he regards as Buchanan's classical-liberal views, he starts with a reconstruction of the somewhat unconventional but very far-sighted way in which Buchanan intuitively made the conceptual distinction between what he calls 'philosophical' liberalism and 'political' (or institutional) liberalism. It seems that Buchanan in his more unguarded moments intended to subscribe to both philosophical and political liberalism. Accepting that philosophical liberalism is impossible, however, he thinks that Buchanan should be seen as a 'communitarian liberal philosopher.' His philosophical use of the unanimity principle rather naturally led him to this position and the political liberalism implied by it. As an ordo- rather than an anarcholiberal, Buchanan understood that in a world without a state, all life would become 'politicized.'. Adapted from the source document.