ABSTRACT
Two themes, more than any other, are at the core of F.A.Hayek’s system of thought: the role of rules and the interplay between the order of rules and the order of actions. The same two themes can be said to be central to the research programme of constitutional political economy, a programme that lies at the intersection of several approaches in modern economics (public choice, law and economics, new institutional economics and others) all of which revive, in one way or another, the classical political economists’ interest in understanding how rules and institutions condition the working characteristics of socio-economic systems (Buchanan 1987a, 1989; Brennan and Buchanan 1985).
