Since anarchy is not viable, limited government is the best that the realistic libertarian can hope for. But limited government will itself always be threatened by an inherent tendency to transgress its limits. In modern western societies the regulatory and redistributive welfare state is the...

This paper distinguishes several types of contractarianism. It argues that Buchanan type contractarianism may be classified as a specific "formal type" of conservatism that grants normative status to the status quo. How such conservative contractarianism relates to and possibly blends into...