""The Limits of Liberty" is concerned mainly with two topics. One is an attempt to construct a new contractarian theory of the state, and the other deals with its legitimate limits. The latter is a matter of great practical importance and is of no small significance from the standpoint of political philosophy." Scott Gordon, "Journal of Political Economy"
James Buchanan offers a strikingly innovative approach to a pervasive problem of social philosophy. The problem is one of the classic paradoxes concerning man's freedom in society: in order to protect individual freedom, the state must...

Volume 2 details the workings of the Court's experimental practice of sending Justices around the country to serve as judges at sessions of the various federal circuit courts. The documents in this volume reveal that the justices quickly voiced bitter complaints about the demands of their circuit duties. They also questioned the propriety--and perhaps constitutionality--of assigning the same individuals to act as superior and inferior court judges. The documents in this volume also touch upon topics that figured prominently in the law and politics of the era: neutrality, the boundary between...

A scientific study of the political and economic factors influencing democratic decision making

Should government's power to tax be limited? The events of the late 1970s in the wake of California's Proposition 13 brought this question very sharply into popular focus. Whether the power to tax should be restricted, and if so how, are issues of immediate policy significance. Providing a serious analysis of these issues, the authors of this 1980 book offer an approach to the understanding and evaluation of the fiscal system, one that yields profound implications. The central question becomes: how much 'power to tax' would the citizen voluntarily grant to government as a party to some...

In his treatise, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), F. A. Hayek emphasized the central role of the generality principle, as embodied in the rule of law, for the maintenance of a free society. This book extends Hayek's argument by applying the generality principle to politics. Several important policy implications emerge. There are no direct implications to suggest how much governments should do. The argument suggests strongly however, that, whatever is done politically, must be done generally rather than discriminatorily.

Studies of public finance, as traditionally developed, have analyzed the effects of fiscal institutions on the market-choice behavior of individuals and firms, but this book takes a different approach. It analyzes the effects of fiscal institutions on the political-choice behavior of individuals as they participate variously in the decision-making processes of democracies.

What effect will the form of a new tax have on individuals' attitudes toward more or less public spending? To what extent does the private sector--public sector mix depend on the way in which tax payments are made?...

This book presents twenty-six of the major papers of 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan, who played a key role in the development of "theoretical institutional economics" and was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic science for his contributions to a theory of political economy as well as his leadership of the public choice movement. These articles, written from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s and spanning various subfields of economics from public finance to methodology, form the core of Buchanan's work. In each paper the constitutional economics paradigm--viewed by the author as a modern...

These thirtyone essays form the foundation of 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's work on the constitutional economics paradigm he founded. Following the earlier collection, "Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy," these essays include many that appeared in journals not easily accessible as well as some which have not previously been published.
The volume is organized in two parts: theoretical foundations and applications. The latter part includes papers on aspects of voting, monetary and fiscal constitutions, public goods supply, taxation and public debt, and...

Though written by an economist, this book's subject is not "economics" in the ordinary sense of that term. Instead, it is James Buchanan's contribution to what he has called the "contractarian revival," the renewed interest in and emphasis on the metaphor of the social contract in evaluating political alternatives. He believes that genuine constitutional dialogue must take place in this country if America is to remain a free society and that the perspectives of an economist are valuable in the discussion of basic issues of social philosophy.
The author critically examines the basic...