Abstract
Buchanan’s approach to political economy is often characterized as rejecting romance in favour of realism: as taking feasibility seriously. But Buchanan provides no detailed account of his understanding of feasibility. This chapter discusses the idea of feasibility and its role at the constitutional, political and individual levels of Buchanan’s work, offers a reconstruction of Buchanan’s position on feasibility based on the idea of politics as exchange, and locates that position in the context of the more recent discussion of the concept of feasibility in the political philosophy literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Buchanan (1979b) (1). In providing citations to Buchanan ’s work I will refer to the original publication, however most of the cited works are conveniently collected in Buchanan (1999) and I will also provide an indicator of the relevant volume in that collection, so a citation might read Buchanan (X) (Y) where X is the date of the original publication as listed in the list of references and Y is the number of the volume of the collected works in which the relevant piece appears.
- 2.
The relevant article is Buchanan (1995) (16), to be discussed below. In the relevant section of their forward to the collected works, the editors are discussing the idea of ‘politics without romance’; the relevant text reads: “…normative analysis must be mediated by a proper sense of the feasible – with ‘feasibility ’ understood both in terms of plausible assumptions about human motivations and behavior and in terms of the ways in which different institutional forms structure human interactions to produce social outcomes.” (Buchanan [1999, Vol. 1, p. xv1])
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- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
See, for example, Buchanan (2004b).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Hamlin (2017).
- 11.
Resource feasibility is the least controversial element of the idea of feasibility since it relates to the physical and technical limitations imposed by generalised scarcity. Value feasibility is of little relevance here since it relates to the relationship between distinct values and identifies an explicitly normative aspect of feasibility . See Hamlin (2017) for details.
- 12.
- 13.
For a discussion, see Hamlin (2014) and references therein.
- 14.
- 15.
Brennan and Eusepi (2013) make the distinction between the ‘marginal’ and the ‘total’ versions of Buchanan ’s contractarian constitutionalism. They argue that the marginal version (represented by Buchanan and Tullock (1962) (3) assumes that we start from a position in which we already have well-established rules and institutions and are asking about reform. The total version (represented by Buchanan [1975] (7)) tackles the task of how a set of rules and political institutions might be established de novo.
- 16.
Of course, constitutional reform might arise by other means—without explicit political exchange among the citizens—for example, through a process of evolution or revolution or by re-interpretation by a constitutional court that might depend on the agreement of only a small number of individuals identified by the current constitution.
- 17.
See the text relating to figures 8 and 9 in Chapter 8 of Buchanan and Tullock (1962) (3).
- 18.
- 19.
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Hamlin, A. (2018). Constitutional, Political and Behavioral Feasibility. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_16
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