James M. Buchanan and Edmund Burke: Opposite Sides of the Same Fiscal Constitution Coin

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-257
Author(s):  
John Considine
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Constitutional Economics ◽  
Economic Constitution ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Internal Inconsistency ◽  
Fiscal Constitution ◽  
Polar Opposite

Constitutional economics examines the individual's choice-between-rules rather than their choice-within-rules. It is, according to James M. Buchanan, a restatement of the classical political economy of Adam Smith. One of its primary normative implications is the need for a fiscal constitution. Given the late eighteenth century intellectual basis for such fiscal constitutions it appears, at first glance, a little strange that the research program does not consider Edmund Burke's 1780 economic constitution worthy of consideration. The most obvious reason for Burke's exclusion from constitutional political economy is that the methodological basis of Buchanan's twentieth century constitutional economics seems almost the polar opposite of Burke's eighteenth century legislator's attempt to introduce a fiscal constitution. However, both methodologies suffer from internal inconsistency in their cases for a fiscal constitution. One of the primary reasons for this inconsistency is that each needs to appeal to ideas more at home in the methodology of the other. Buchanan adapts a quasi-Burke approach by the introduction of ethical norms not consistent with the self-interest postulate, while Burke adopts a quasi-Buchanan approach by appealing to the principle of consent to justify his reform of institutions that have been formed by custom and tradition. Ultimately, the methodological difference is not as great as it appears at first. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Burke's work deserves recognition in the broader constitutional economics research program because to exclude him on the grounds of methodology is to fail to understand the logical implications of Buchanan's work.

Constitutional Economics and the Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Voigt
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
The Self ◽  
Constitutional Political Economy ◽  
Constitutional Economics ◽  
Established Method ◽  
Self Interest

The economic analysis of constitutions, also known as ‘constitutional economics’ or ‘constitutional political economy’ is a young research program. Standard economics used to focus on the analysis of choices within rules, thus assuming rules to be exogenously given and fixed. Constitutional economics broadens this research program by analyzing the choice of rules, using the established method of economics, i.e. rational choice. This article discusses the two broad research avenues in constitutional economics: the normative branch, which is interested in legitimizing the state and its most basic rules by drawing solely on the self-interest of rational individuals; and the positive branch, which is interested in explaining, firstly, the (economic) effects of alternative constitutional rules and, secondly, the emergence and modification of constitutional rules.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Points Of Interest

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

Contractarian Perspectives in Law and Economics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Vanberg ◽  
Viktor Vanberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Law And Economics ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Constitutional Political Economy ◽  
Constitutional Economics ◽  
Classical Economics

This article sketches the distinct perspective that a contractarian approach can bring to law and economics. It focuses on a particularly important strand of the contractarian tradition: the constitutional political economy (CPE) research program (also known as constitutional economics), developed most fully in the work of Nobel laureate James Buchanan. Like law and economics, the CPE paradigm is primarily concerned with the comparative analysis of social, economic, and political institutions. But its foundational assumptions offer a distinct contrast to the mainstream neoclassical paradigm that has dominated law and economics as a field. The article first provides a brief overview of contractarian approaches. It then describes the central features of the CPE paradigm. It contrasts the foundations of the CPE approach with those of neo-classical economics; explores the implications of these differences for the research foci at the heart of these two traditions; and discusses how mainstream and constitutional economics approaches may be reconciled.

Adam Smith: Scottish moral philosopher as political economist

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Winch
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
Commutative Justice ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Autonomous Science

AbstractBy contrast with those for whom the Wealth of nations marks the origin of economics as an autonomous science, this article argues that Smith's significance lies in his attempt to repossess political economy by restoring its links with the sciences of morals and natural jurisprudence — those concerns which are characteristic of his writings as a moral philosopher. The case proceeds by re-examining two topics derived from these sciences. The first begins with Smith's ungenerous treatment of his mercantile predecessors as a clue to what he believed was distinctive about his own system. Smith was antagonistic to precisely those rationalist, utilitarian and reductive models of behaviour based on self-interest that he is held to have in common with mercantile writers; he was answering rather than joining those who felt it necessary to isolate and legitimate rational economic self-seeking. The second topic turns on Smith's natural jurisprudence: his application of the criteria of natural justice when criticizing mercantile policies and institutions, where the emphasis falls on the negative injunctions of commutative justice rather than the positive ones of distributive justice. The separation of the ethics of the Theory of moral sentiments from the Wealth of nations, therefore, tells us more about Smith's successors than Smith himself.

Political Economy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 154-190
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Force ◽  
Prime Movers ◽  
The Rich

This chapter explores how money moves people in two ways, as depicted in eighteenth-century commercial writing. Obviously, it incites and gratifies powerful passions: greed, envy, and “self-liking,” in Bernard Mandeville's terms early in the century—or, as Adam Smith later has it, feelings appropriate to different social stations, such as merchants' slow-burning passion for gain or the consuming vanities of the rich and great. Strong feelings serve as the prime movers of commerce. But money also affects people in ways they feel just barely or not at all. Their personally, passionately motivated acts lead them unawares to participate in the movement of money as a social force. Indeed, the insensible movements of money, prices, tendencies of taxation, and the like seem to float free of any particular human feeling, motive, or agency. Ultimately, the feeling and unfeeling generated by commerce intertwine as themes in the period's writing, and together they expand the affective range of commercial life beyond what scholars have usually thought of as “economic sentiments.”

Smith, Adam (1723–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud Haakonssen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Eyewitness Reports ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

Despite his reputation as the founder of political economy, Adam Smith was a philosopher who constructed a general system of morals in which political economy was but one part. The philosophical foundation of his system was a Humean theory of imagination that encompassed a distinctive idea of sympathy. Smith saw sympathy as our ability to understand the situation of the other person, a form of knowledge that constitutes the basis for all assessment of the behaviour of others. Our spontaneous tendency to observe others is inevitably turned upon ourselves, and this is Smith’s key to understanding the moral identity of the individual through social interaction. On this basis he suggested a theory of moral judgment and moral virtue in which justice was the key to jurisprudence. Smith developed an original theory of rights as the core of ‘negative’ justice, and a theory of government as, primarily, the upholder of justice. But he maintained the political significance of ‘positive’ virtues in a public, non-governmental sphere. Within this framework he saw a market economy developing as an expression of humanity’s prudent self-interest. Such self-interest was a basic feature of human nature and therefore at work in any form of society; but commercial society was special because it made the pursuit of self-interest compatible with individual liberty; in the market the poor are not personally dependent upon the rich. At the same time, he recognized dangers in commercial society that needed careful institutional and political management. Smith’s basic philosophy is contained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but a major part concerning law and government was never completed to Smith’s satisfaction and he burnt the manuscript before he died. Consequently the connection to the Wealth of Nations (1776) can only be partially reconstructed from two sets of students’ notes (1762–3 and 1763–4) from his Lectures on Jurisprudence at Glasgow (Smith [1762–6] 1978). These writings are complemented by a volume of essays and student-notes from lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres. Although a philosopher of public life and in some measure a public figure, Adam Smith adhered to the Enlightenment ideal of privacy to a degree rarely achieved by his contemporaries. He left no autobiographical accounts and, given his national and international fame, the surviving correspondence is meagre. The numerous eyewitness reports of him mostly relate particular episodes and individual traits of character. Just as there are only a few portraits of the man’s appearance, there are no extensive accounts of the personality, except Dugald Stewart’s ‘Life of Adam Smith’ (1793), written after Smith’s death and designed to fit Stewart’s eclectic supplementation of common sense philosophy. While Smith was a fairly sociable man, his friendships were few and close only with men who respected his desire for privacy. David Hume was pre-eminent among them.

Modernism, economics, and the ancient economy

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 174-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Meikle
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ancient Economy ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Last Stage ◽  
The Way

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear.It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce.

scholarly journals Market and state: the perspective of constitutional political economy

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIKTOR J. VANBERG
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Political Economy ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Consumer Sovereignty ◽  
Voluntary Exchange ◽  
Economic Constitution ◽  
Rules Of The Game

The paper approaches the ‘market versus state’ issue from the perspective of constitutional political economy, a research program that has been advanced as a principal alternative to traditional welfare economics and its perspective on the relation between market and state. Constitutional political economy looks at market and state as different kinds of social arenas in which people may realize mutual gains from voluntary exchange and cooperation. The working properties of these arenas depend on their respective constitutions, i.e. the rules of the game that define the constraints under which individuals are allowed, in either arena, to pursue their interests. It is argued that ‘improving’ markets means to adopt and to maintain an economic constitution that enhances consumer sovereignty, and that ‘improvement’ in the political arena means to adopt and to maintain constitutional rules that enhance citizen sovereignty.

scholarly journals PARA LER ADAM SMITH: NOVAS ABORDAGENS

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (103) ◽  
pp. 181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo E. A. da Gama Cerqueira
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Political

Uma compreensão renovada do pensamento de Adam Smith emergiu ao longo dos últimos anos. Ela é resultado do esforço de intérpretes que optaram por enfatizar a dimensão política e ética de sua obra, contextualizando-a em relação aos problemas e motivações intelectuais do século XVIII. Este artigo apresenta a trajetória histórica da recepção da obra de Adam Smith e discute as interpretações mais recentes sobre a relação entre sua filosofia moral e sua economia política.Abstract: A new comprehension of Adam Smith’s writings has arisen in the last few years. These studies have emphasized the political and ethical dimensions of his work and its connection with the eighteenth-century context. This article reviews the historical reception of Smith’s works and discusses the recent literature about the relation between his moral philosophy and political economy.

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