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The purpose of this paper is to present "What Should Economists Do?", an article written by James Buchanan and published in 1964, in an historical perspective. We put forward an important point, namely the opposition with Ludwig von Mises, and Buchanan's attempt at differentiating his approach from Mises. Instead of in addition to Robbins, that he nominally targeted, Buchanan was actually criticizing Mises. Buchanan thus defined economics in a very specific way, as a science that studies exchange but only when it results from a desire (or a propensity) to exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Buchanan's views on public finance have already been analyzed and they are quite well known, as are their origins and roots. However, nothing has ever been said about why Buchanan chose public finance in the first place. The first goal of this paper is to show that Buchanan had made this choice before arriving at Chicago. We show how Carlton C. Sims and Charles P. White influenced him. We also show, by analyzing Buchanan's M.A. thesis, that he was not only interested in public finance but was also primarily concerned by ethical questions and defended a bureaucratic centralized solution to solve the problem he was discussing - how to share the benefits collected from a gasoline tax among Counties. This helps to understand that Buchanan did not choose to study public finance to learn how to fight government intervention. Quite the contrary: it was to legitimate it. Second, we also demonstrate that a lot of the ideas that will matter for Buchanan in his career - the importance of ethics and the principle of an equal treatment for equals, the need to link taxes to benefits, the importance to adapt the scale of provision of a public good to the type of public good - were already present in this first work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nobel Prize winning economist James M. Buchanan has repeatedly argued that the "political economist should not act as if he or she were providing advice to a benevolent despot" (Boettke Constitutional Political Economy, 25, 110-124, 2014: 112), but an increasingly influential body of scholarship argues that Buchanan provided a wealth of early 1980s policy advice to Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile (e.g., Fischer 2009; Maclean 2017). In particular, Buchanan reportedly provided an analytical defense of military rule to a predominantly Chilean audience when he visited the country in late 1981. This paper draws upon largely ignored archival evidence from the Buchanan House Archives and Chilean primary source material to assess whether Buchanan provided a defense of Pinochet's "capitalist fascism" (Samuelson 1983) or whether he defended democracy when he visited Chile in 1981. Aside from the importance of this for assessing Buchanan's own legacy, his constitutional political economy arguments presented in Chile also provide an interesting and distinct perspective on the connection between democracy and growth, which remains highly relevant to current debates. Despite a general agreement about the desirability of democracy, the view that authoritarian regimes can spur "growth miracles", or might even be a necessary stage in political-economic development, still has prominent supporters (e.g. Sachs 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, which is concerned with philosophical methodology as it might affect social science and ethics, the endeavor is to explore the depth and implications of Buchanan's interest in Spinoza. After establishing their connection, the paper explores the parallels between Spinoza's 'dualism' and Buchanan's own dualism and how that can shed light on Buchanan's distinction between constitutional and operational modalities. Given their analogous perspectives, the paper then considers the possibility of dimensional shifts in the dualism, such that what was once a constitutional perspective becomes operational and how that ability to shift might affect various research agendas in the social sciences and ethics. Finally, we raise the question of how separate are the two levels and can they be brought together. In a Spinozistic framework, they ultimately would collapse into a monism, but the conclusion here is that for Buchanan there must always be a gap between them. As a result, the effort to resolve the tension between the dimensions may signal future research agendas in ethics and political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is explores the relationship between ethics and liberal market orders both as a form of justifying those orders and as a way of being within such orders. The argument shows that there are a number of tensions and ambiguities between ethics and liberal market orders perhaps best captured as differences between visible and invisible hands. Two prominent attempts to adjudicate these tensions—that of Buchanan and McCloskey—are examined and a matrix for thinking about the relation between ethics and liberal market orders is developed. My own approach to resolving the tension in light of that matrix is outlined, which paradoxically suggests that on the one hand, liberalism is justified for having a certain suspicion of ethics while on the other hand is the political and social theory most encouraging of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meir Kohn’s Exchange and Value claims that economics can be organised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterize the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as “law and economics”. We compare and contrasts the perspectives proposed by two prominent scholars—James Buchanan and Richard Posner—and argue that they, respectively, represent the exchange and the value paradigm in law and economics. More precisely, we show that Buchanan sticks to a definition of economics based on the exchange paradigm, and this leads him to define law and economics in a rather specific, different, narrower than Posner’s way to define law and economics—a definition that corresponds to a conception of economics based on the value paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]