The contractarian constitutional political economy of James Buchanan

Constitutional political economy was the field in which James Buchanan devoted the most effort and to which he made the largest contribution. Although his finely grained arguments cannot be easily summarized, the main developments and central line of reasoning can be covered in a single paper, because his research relied upon a single framework, which continually reappears and is further developed as his thinking matured. The goal of this paper is to analyze how his ideas emerged and were used to develop a very rich constitutional political economy.