The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy / Edition 1

by James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock

Overview

The Calculus of Consent was co-authored by Buchanan with Gordon Tullock, with whom Buchanan collaborated on many books and academic enterprises throughout their careers. As Robert D. Tollison states in the foreword, “[this book] is a radical departure from the way democracies conduct their business. The Calculus is already a book for the ages.”

This classic work analyzes the political organization of a free society through the lens of the economic organization of society. The authors acknowledge their unease as economists in analyzing the political organization, but they take the risk of forging into unfamiliar territory because they believe the benefits of their perspective will bear much fruit.

As the authors state, their objective in this book is “to analyze the calculus of the rational individual when he is faced with questions of constitutional choice. . . . We examine the [choice] process extensively only with reference to the problem of decision-making rules.”

The authors describe their approach as “economic individualism.” They believe that economists have explored individual choice extensively in the market sector while social scientists have largely ignored the dynamics of individual decision-making in the dynamics of forming group action in the public sector.

Written in the early 1960s, The Calculus of Consent has become a bulwark of the public choice movement for which James M. Buchanan is so justly famous.

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) was an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and was considered one of the greatest scholars of liberty in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865972186
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/01/1999
Series:	Collected Works of James M. Buchanan Series , #3
Edition description:	Volume 3
Pages:	376
Sales rank:	696,154
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Charles K. Rowley ix

James McGill Buchanan, by Gordon Tullock xix

Preface xxi

PART I. THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

1. Introduction 3

2. The Individualistic Postulate 11

3. Politics and the Economic Nexus 16

4. Individual Rationality in Social Choice 30

PART II. THE REALM OF SOCIAL CHOICE

5. The Organization of Human Activity 41

6. A Generalized Economic Theory of Constitutions 60

7. The Rule of Unanimity 81

8. The Costs of Decision-Making 93

PART III. ANALYSES OF DECISION-MAKING RULES

9. The Structure of the Models 115

10. Simple Majority Voting 127

11. Simple Majority Voting and the Theory of Games 143

12. Majority Rule, Game Theory, and Pareto Optimality 165

13. Pareto Optimality, External Costs, and Income Redistribution 182

14. The Range and Extent of Collective Action 192

15. Qualified Majority Voting Rules, Representation, and

the Interdependence of Constitutional Variables 202

16. The Bicameral Legislature 222

17. The Orthodox Model of Majority Rule 237

PART IV. THE ECONOMICS AND THE ETHICS OF DEMOCRACY

18. Democratic Ethics and Economic Efficiency 253

19. Pressure Groups, Special Interests, and the Constitution 269

20. The Politics of the Good Society 281

APPENDIX 1

Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy,

by James M. Buchanan 291

APPENDIX 2

Theoretical Forerunners, by Gordon Tullock 310

Index 333