Rejecting all knowledge claims concerning right and wrong in matters practical James Buchanan concurred with legal positivism that invalid law cannot be identified by its substantive content but only by an inherited defect in its factual creation. Beyond correct creation Buchanan proposed as a...

It is shown that the basic normative argument of the 'calculus' is moored to a collectivistic unanimity norm. As most scholars working in the field of public choice, including the authors of the seminal 'calculus,' would otherwise reject collectivistic normative premises, a reinterpretation of...

The paper explores some of the surprisingly many relations between theories of public choice and political philosophy. Focusing on variants of Homo oeconomicus it does so systematically rather than historically. But it factors in the history of the two disciplines along with some recent...

In a setting in which the provision of a collective good is at stake the "principle of generality as equal treatment" is related to the concept of "envy free net trades". This leads to an operational formulation of the fundamental liberal aim of non-discriminatory politics in terms of stated...