ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a novel reading of James Buchanan’s political philosophy and political economy. It starts by demonstrating that Buchanan’s approach to political theory was driven by concerns quite similar to Rawls’s: the hazards of a generalized prisoner’s dilemma. Buchanan’s argument is essentially that all it needs to escape the current modus vivendi is agreement on facts. He argues, to put it differently, that if we could agree on the facts (i.e. the constitutional economist’s theory of the market), life could be a lot less nasty. Buchanan thus argues that society could move to a much more peaceful and productive state of affairs if it is able to erase its disagreements about economic theory. What makes Buchanan’s claim interesting from a theoretical vantage point is that it solves the question at hand with a much more limited set of abstractions. It only normalizes the agents’ socio-economic beliefs, while a theory such as Rawls’s theory of justice normalizes both socio-economic and moral beliefs. An important upshot of this chapter is therefore that it highlights the fact that pervasive political disagreement – contrary to the standard verdict – is rooted not only in disagreement about norms but also about facts.
