Buchanan mentions at several points in his oeuvre the necessary role for a ‘constitutional attitude' – at the individual (‘the private man') and social level (‘the public man'). Buchanan's constitutional attitude is both explanatory and evaluative; it explains why citizens value liberty...

The international development debate is increasingly referring to the notion of the "social contract" - often, however, without a clear definition of the term and its implications. We therefore make a suggestion for measuring at least some elements of social contracts in order to make it easier...

This paper makes a simple but underappreciated point: due to the open-ended nature of constitutional entrepreneurship, the personal characteristics of constitutional entrepreneurs — intellect, will, virtues and vices, etc. — directly bear on constitutional change. The paper demonstrates this...

In this note, three major areas of Buchanan's research are briefly described: (1) The ideas of Knut Wicksell on Buchanan's work, (2) constitutional economics and the veil of ignorance, and (3) the role of government and/or the power to tax. It is shown that these three areas had a major...

Pareto optimality is a concept in economics that deals with optimum condition of resource distribution. James Buchanan in his essay extended the idea into the political realm to understand how unanimous consensus is reached. This essay attempts to examine whether he was justified in using the...