30 years after the nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy
Abstract
© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. There are three
main foundations of Public Choice theory: methodological individualism, behavioral
symmetry, and “politics as exchange.” The first two are represented in nearly all
work that identifies as “Public Choice,” but politics as exchange is often forgotten
or de-emphasized. This paper—adapted from a lecture given on the occasion of the 30th
year after Buchanan’s Nobel Prize—fleshes out Buchanan’s theory of politics as exchange,
using four notions that are uniquely central to his thought: philosophical anarchism,
ethical neutrality, subjectivism, and the “relatively absolute absolutes.” A central
tension in Buchanan’s work is identified, in which he seems simultaneously to argue
both that nearly anything agreed to by a group could be enforced within the group
as a contract, and that there are certain types of rules and arrangements, generated
by decentralized processes, that serve human needs better than state action. It is
argued that it is a mistake to try to reconcile this tension, and that both parts
of the argument are important.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17612Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s11138-018-0418-3Publication Info
Munger, MC (2018). 30 years after the nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy. The Review of Austrian Economics, 31(2). pp. 151-167. 10.1007/s11138-018-0418-3. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17612.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Michael C. Munger
Professor of Political Science
Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program. His primary
research focus is on the functioning of markets, regulation, and government institutions.
He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina
(where he was Director of the Master of Public Administration Program), as well as
working as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration.
Munger is a past President of the Public

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