ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts the way in which political scientists and philosophers, on the one hand, and economists on the other, tend to view liberty, or at least, frame the idea of liberty. This exercise is regarded as 'PPE scholarship'. Seen through the eyes of Adam Smith, interdependencies between agents are not to be thought of in terms of 'interferences', not occasions in which one or other or both must be made worse off or, for that matter, diverted from a 'natural path'. Now, few political theorists define liberty as absence of interdependence. The standard definition invokes the concept of 'interference'. One appeals to the framework of constitutional analysis set out by Buchanan and Tullock (1962), it seems clear that both markets and political processes enjoy the same status and by virtue of the same procedure, namely quasi-unanimous agreement behind a veil of ignorance that is assumed to be appropriately thick.
