Constitutional Optimism and Skepticism in Buchanan and Jasay

Ever since James M. Buchanan came across Anthony de Jasay’s “The State” ¹ he has praised the book and recommended it to others. That Buchanan would like the approach is not surprising since there are striking similarities between “The State” and “The Power to Tax”. ² In “The State” as well as in “The Power to Tax” the state is conceived as an actor pursuing the sole aim of maximizing its power of extracting rents from its citizens. But whereas Buchanan uses the assumption of a rent-maximizing state as basis of a purely conceptual exercise it expresses an essentially true statement about the human condition in state-governed societies for Jasay. However pessimistic on the surface, at heart Buchanan’s view of constitutional democracy remains fundamentally optimistic whereas Jasay’s is pessimistic throughout. Even though Buchanan like Jasay cannot but look at many of the recent developments of constitutional democracy with contempt he conceives it as capable and as worthy of reform while in Jasay’s eyes the whole enterprise of constitutional democracy is beyond repair or at least eventually doomed to end in populism and worse.