Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:02:11.612Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“A Quite Similar Enterprise … Interpreted Quite Differently”? James Buchanan, John Rawls and the Politics of the Social Contract

Part of: The Historical Rawls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Ben Jackson  and
Zofia Stemplowska
Ben Jackson*
Affiliation:
Faculty of History and University College, Oxford University
Zofia Stemplowska
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations and Worcester College, Oxford University E-mail: [email protected]
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A striking aspect of the initial reception of John Rawls is that he was embraced by leading market-liberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. This article investigates the reasons for the free-market right's sympathetic interest in the early Rawls by providing a historical account of the dialogue between Rawls and his key neoliberal interlocutor, James Buchanan. We set out the common intellectual context, notably the influence of Frank Knight, that framed the initial work of both Buchanan and Rawls and brought them together as seeming allies during the early 1960s. We then analyze a significant theoretical divergence between the two in the 1970s related to their contrasting responses to the politics of those years and to differences over the importance of ideal theory in political thought. The exchanges between Buchanan and Rawls demonstrate that Rawlsian liberalism and neoliberalism initially emerged as entwined critiques of mid-twentieth-century political economy but could not sustain that alliance when faced by the new claims for civil and social rights that became a marked feature of politics after the 1960s.

Type
Forum: The Historical Rawls
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 1010 - 1033
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 James M. Buchanan to F. A. Hayek, 24 Nov. 1965, Folder 14, Box 13, Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers (86002), Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (hereafter Hayek Papers); Buchanan, James M., “Ethical Rules, Expected Values and Large Numbers,” Ethics 76/1 (1965), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Precisely how influential Buchanan was—and how best to understand his approach to democratic theory—has been the subject of considerable debate: Maclean, Nancy, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York, 2017)Google Scholar; Henry Farrell and Steven M. Teles, “When Politics Drives Scholarship,” Boston Review, 30 Aug. 2017, at http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/henry-farrell-steven-m-teles-when-politics-drives-scholarship; Jennifer Burns, review of Democracy in Chains, History of Political Economy 50/3 (2018), 640–48; Munger, Michael C., “On the Origins and Goals of Public Choice: Constitutional Conspiracy?”, Independent Review 22/3 (2018), 359–82Google Scholar; Fleury, Jean-Baptiste and Marciano, Alain, “The Sound of Silence: A Review Essay of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains,” Journal of Economic Literature 56/4 (2018), 1492–1537CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mirowski, Philip, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of James Buchanan,” boundary 2 46/1 (2019), 197–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 11; Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 39–40; Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Oxford, 2012); William A. Edmundson, John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge, 2017).

4 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (London, 1982; first published 1976), 100; Lister, Andrew, “The ‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek against (and for) Rawls,” Critical Review 25/3–4 (2013), 409–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Buchanan to Hayek, 24 Nov. 1965.

6 James M. Buchanan to W. G. Runciman, 15 July 1965, copy at Box 109, Gordon Tullock Papers (82072), Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (hereafter Tullock Papers). For Runciman's use of Rawls see e.g. Runciman, W. G. and Sen, Amartya, “Games, Justice and the General Will,” Mind 74/269 (1965), 554–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Rawls was nominated for membership by Milton Friedman in 1968 and listed e.g. on the March 1970 membership list: “Proposals for Membership, September 1968,” Folder 1, Box 44, MPS Papers (81123), Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University; MPS, “List of Members” (March 1970), Box 58, Tullock Papers, 19. In itself, this is not that significant—Rawls did not attend any MPS conferences and he was removed from the membership list by 1971 (Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton, 2016), 272). It was rather an indicator of the esteem in which he was held by leading neoliberal thinkers. On the MPS see Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 87–151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Barbara Fried, “The Unwritten Theory of Justice: Rawlsian Liberalism versus Libertarianism,” in Jon Mandle and David Reidy, eds., A Companion to Rawls (Chichester, 2013), 430–49, at 430–31.

9 A selection of their correspondence has been published in Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, eds., The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism (Ann Arbor, 2008), 405–15; David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School (Cambridge, 2020), 36–9.

10 James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Cheltenham, 2005), 99–100. “Realistic utopia” is itself a term used by Rawls: John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 6.

11 Geoffrey Brennan, “James Buchanan: An Assessment,” March 2013, at https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/geoffrey-brennan-james-buchanan-an-assessment-march-2013 (accessed 27 June 2020). We are grateful to Alan Hamlin for providing us with his own recollection of this occasion.

12 Jules Coleman, “Constitutional Contractarianism,” Constitutional Political Economy 1/2 (1990), 135–48; David Reisman, James Buchanan (Basingstoke, 2015), 46–64; S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago, 2003), 149–52; Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge, 2016), 182–7; Fleury and Marciano, “The Sound of Silence,” 1506–7; Brian Kogelmann, “Rawls, Buchanan and the Search for a Better Social Contract,” in Paul Dragos Aligica, Christopher J. Coyne and Stephanie Haeffele, eds., Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of James M. Buchanan (London, 2018), 17–38; Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019), 108–10; Levy and Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals, 30–35.

13 Reidy, David, “Rawls's Religion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31/2 (2010), 309–44Google Scholar; Reidy, “Rawls on Philosophy and Democracy: Lessons from the Archived Papers,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 265–74; Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33/4 (2012), 701–25; Bok, P. MacKenzie, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 153–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bok, “‘The Latest Invasion from Britain’: Young Rawls and His Community of American Ethical Theorists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 275–85; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 1–39; Andrius Gališanka, John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2019).

14 Arrow, Kenneth, “Some Ordinalist Utilitarian Notes on Rawls's Theory of Justice,” Journal of Philosophy 70/9 (1973), 245–63;Google Scholar Daniel Little, “Rawls and Economics,” in Mandle and Reidy, A Companion to Rawls, 504–25, at 504–12; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 12–24; Gališanka, John Rawls, 84, 89–95; Stefan Eich, this issue.

15 Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (London, 1951); William J. Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State (London, 1952); Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 117–22; Beatrice Cherrier and Jean-Baptiste Fleury, “Economists’ Interest in Collective Decision after World War II: A History,” Public Choice 172/1–2 (2017), 24–33; Herrade Igersheim, “The Death of Welfare Economics: History of a Controversy,” History of Political Economy 51/5 (2019), 827–65.

16 For Rawls see Bevir and Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” 701–25; Anne M. Kornhauser, Debating the American State (Philadelphia, 2015), 175–220; Gališanka, Andrius, “Just Society as a Fair Game: John Rawls and Game Theory in the 1950s,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78/2 (2017), 299–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Buchanan see Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 133–55; Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 175–92.

17 Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960 (Cambridge, 2010); Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago, 2012); Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made (Chicago, 2015); Amadae, Prisoners of Reason.

18 Burgin, Angus, “The Radical Conservatism of Frank Knight,” Modern Intellectual History 6/3 (2009), 513–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross Emmett, Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics (London, 2009).

19 Frank Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” in Knight, The Ethics of Competition (London, 1936), 277–360, at 348.

20 Levy and Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals, 261.

21 James M. Buchanan, Economics from the Outside In: “Better than Plowing” and Beyond (College Station, 2007), 71–2, 75–7, 205–6; James M. Buchanan, “The Economizing Element in Knight's Ethical Critique of the Capitalist Order,” Ethics 98/1 (1987), 61–75, at 61; Ross Emmett, “Why James Buchanan Kept Frank Knight's Picture on His Wall Despite Fundamental Disagreements on Economics, Ethics, and Politics,” in Richard E. Wagner, ed., James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Basingstoke, 2018), 1155–70.

22 “John Rawls: For the Record,” interview by Samuel R. Aybar, Joshua D. Harlan and Won J. Lee, Harvard Review of Philosophy 1/1 (1991), 38–47, at 39; Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford, 2007), 16–17; Gališanka, “Just Society as a Fair Game,” 302.

23 Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York, 1921), 43–8. See also R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York, 1957), 13.

24 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 152–6.

25 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 287–8. Knight's argument about the inescapability of normative values in turn influenced Paul Samuelson (another of Knight's students) in his formulation of the “new welfare economics.” See Roger Backhouse, Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A. Samuelson, vol. 1, Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948 (Oxford, 2017), 462–70.

26 Ben Jackson and Zofia Stemplowska, “On Frank Knight's ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’,” Ethics 125/2 (2015), 552–4; Andrew Lister, “Markets, Desert and Reciprocity,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16/1 (2017), 47–69; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 24.

27 Frank Knight, “The Ethics of Competition” (1923), in Knight, Ethics of Competition, 41–75, at 56.

28 Ibid., 57. Although Knight was temporally the most proximate source of this point for Rawls, as Eric Nelson and Albert Weale have observed, similar ideas can also be traced back to Rawls's reading of Christian theology and Henry Sidgwick respectively: Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 49–72; Albert Weale, “Meaning and Context in Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory, 13 May 2020, at doi:10.1177/1474885120925375, 5–6. However, the fact that Rawls's contemporaries, like Buchanan and Hayek (less assiduous readers of theology and Sidgwick), also adopted the same skepticism about desert suggests that Knight was pivotal in drawing this point to the attention of political theorists.

29 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 292.

30 Ibid., 295–9, 304–5.

31 Ibid., 296–7.

32 Knight, “Ethics of Competition,” 46, 60–66.

33 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 301–3; Ross Emmett, “Maximisers versus Good Sports: Frank Knight's Curious Understanding of Exchange Behavior,” in Emmett, Frank Knight and the Chicago School, 87–97.

34 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 342–5, quotes at 342, 345; see Burgin, “Radical Conservatism,” 530–33, on this aspect of Knight's thought. For the affinities between Knight and Habermasian discourse ethics (rather than Rawlsian contractarianism) see Dalibor Roháč, “Knight, Habermas and Rawls on Freedom, Personhood and Constitutional Choice,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 19/1 (2012), 23–43.

35 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 349–52, quote at 351.

36 Ibid., 357–9, quotes at 357, 358.

37 Thus when Stemplowska and Swift name Rawls as the author of the term “ideal theory” they are mistaken (even though the rest of their analysis is accurate). Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” in David Estlund, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2012), 373–89. See also Stemplowska and Swift, “Rawls on Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” in Mandle and Reidy, Companion to Rawls, 112–27; and Zofia Stemplowska, “What's Ideal about Ideal Theory?”, Social Theory and Practice 34/3 (2008), 319–40.

38 Ross Emmett, “Frank Knight, Max Weber, Chicago Economics, and Institutionalism,” in Emmett, Frank Knight and the Chicago School, 111–123, at 114–16, 119–20.

39 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 278, original emphasis.

40 Knight, “The Ethics of Competition,” 44. Rawls underlined this passage in his copy of the book and wrote in the margin, “J as F holds this view.” Image reproduced in David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Efficiency or a ‘Fair’ Game: John Rawls Contra Lionel Robbins,” working paper, 27 Nov. 2007, at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237278013_Efficiency_or_a_Fair_Game_John_Rawls_Contra_Lionel_Robbins (accessed 27 June 2020), 14.

41 James M. Buchanan, “Genesis,” Public Choice 152/3 (2012), 253–5, at 253.

42 Buchanan, Economics from the Outside, 14.

43 John Rawls to James Buchanan, n.d. (c. June/July 1962), Box 46, Series 1: Correspondence, James M. Buchanan papers (C0246), Special Collections Research Center, George Mason University Libraries (hereafter Buchanan Papers).

44 James M. Buchanan, “Obituary: Justice among Natural Equals: Memorial Marker for John Rawls,” Public Choice 114/3–4 (2003), iii–v, at v.

45 Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 149.

46 John Rawls, “Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice” (1963), in John Rawls, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 73–95, at 74. This is confirmed in the letter from Rawls cited above at n. 43.

47 Jacob Marschak, “Rational Behavior, Uncertain Prospects, and Measurable Utility,” Econometrica 18/2 (1950), 111–41; Kenneth Arrow, “Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations,” Econometrica 19/4 (1951), 404–37; Arrow, “Ordinalist Utilitarian Notes,” 250–51.

48 John Harsanyi, “Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-Taking,” Journal of Political Economy 61/5 (1953), 434–5; and Harsanyi, “Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility,” Journal of Political Economy 63/4 (1955), 309–21, at 316. On Harsanyi see Philippe Fontaine, “The Homeless Observer: John Harsanyi on Interpersonal Utility Comparisons and Bargaining, 1950–64,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 32/2 (2010), 145–73; for discussion of Harsanyi's veil see Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley, 1989), esp. 76–9, 334–5.

49 Gališanka, “Just Society as a Fair Game,” 302–4; Gališanka, John Rawls, 90–92; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 12–14.

50 Pogge, John Rawls, 16–17; James M. Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” Public Choice 13/1 (1972), 123–8, at 123; James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, vol. 3, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Indianapolis, 1999; first published 1962), 80; James M. Buchanan, “Politics and Science: Reflections on Knight's Critique of Polanyi,” Ethics 77/4 (1967), 303–10, at 307–9.

51 Buchanan also cited Rutledge Vining, another economist taught by Knight, as sparking Buchanan's interest in designing constitutional rules. See Malcolm Rutherford, “Chicago Economics and Institutionalism,” in Ross Emmett, ed., The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics (Cheltenham, 2010), 25–39, at 35; Buchanan, Economics From the Outside, 210.

52 Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, 78–80, quotes at 78.

53 Copy of The Calculus of Consent, Box 14, Personal Library of John Rawls (HUM 48.1), Harvard University Archives (hereafter Rawls Library), 78. Harsanyi is also cited in Rawls's “Justice as Reciprocity,” which was published in 1971, and contained references to a 1966 publication, but was drafted in 1959. See Samuel Freeman, “Editor's Preface,” in Rawls, Collected Papers, ix–xii, at x; and John Rawls, “Justice as Reciprocity,” in ibid., 190–224, at 217.

54 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness” (1958), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 52–4. However, the paper contained the idea that the “restrictions which would so arise might be thought of as those a person would keep in mind if he were designing a practice in which his enemy were to assign him his place.” Ibid., 54. This was echoed in “Justice as Reciprocity.”

55 Rawls, “Constitutional Liberty,” 83, 84.

56 John Rawls, “The Sense of Justice” (1963), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 96–116, at 113.

57 John Rawls, “Distributive Justice” (1967), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 130–54, at 132.

58 James Buchanan, “Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy,” in Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, 305–25, at 320–21; James Buchanan, “The Relevance of Pareto Optimality,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6/4 (1962), 341–54.

59 Buchanan, “Marginal Notes,” 321.

60 Copy of The Calculus of Consent, Rawls Library, 319. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 150, has pointed out that Rawls's 1964 paper to the Committee for Non-Market Decision-Making argued against economists’ focus on the Pareto principle to the exclusion of other criteria for this reason.

61 Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, 82.

62 Gordon Tullock to John Rawls, 8 June 1964, Folder 2, Box 19, John Rawls Papers (HUM 48), Harvard University Archives (hereafter Rawls Papers).

63 In Rawls's case this commitment to institutional structures can be traced back to his early utilitarian article “Two Concepts of Rules” (1955), in Rawls, Collected Papers, 20–46. Rawls made Buchanan aware of this article after the publication of The Calculus of Consent, observing that “Hayek mentions it in his notes.” Rawls to Buchanan, n.d. (c. June/July 1962); James Buchanan to John Rawls, 13 July 1962, both in Box 46, Series 1: Correspondence, Buchanan Papers. We are grateful to Alan Hamlin for emphasizing the significance of this article.

64 Harsanyi, “Cardinal Welfare,” 316.

65 Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, Introduction and 78. They were referring to F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960), 210–12. Kogelmann, “Rawls, Buchanan and the Search,” gives further reasons for thinking of Buchanan's method as irreducibly normative.

66 Though he also made further moves, such as his focus on primary goods, which made a determinate solution more likely.

67 James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy (New York, 1970); Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Alain Marciano, “The Making of a Constitutionalist: James Buchanan on Education,” History of Political Economy 50/3 (2018), 511–48.

68 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 123.

69 Katrina Forrester, “Citizenship, War, and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political Philosophy,” Historical Journal 57/3 (2014), 773–801; Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 40–110. For example, Rawls later referenced Supreme Court cases that gave hints about his political views. He clearly approved of Brown v. Board of Education (1954); see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1996), 250 n. 39. He also offered relative praise to Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) for recognizing “the legitimacy of subversive advocacy in a constitutional democracy,” and approved of Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964) for recognizing the importance of “a full and equally effective voice in a fair scheme of representation” for all. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 345, 361. He was critical of the “profoundly dismaying” decisions in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and First National Bank v. Bellotti (1978) that went against election spending limits. Ibid., 359.

70 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 123; James M. Buchanan to John Rawls, 11 May 1972, Folder 6, Box 19, Rawls Papers.

71 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 124. This is a point also made by later critics of Rawls: Barry, Theories of Justice; Jeremy Waldron, “John Rawls and the Social Minimum,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 3/1 (1986), 21–33.

72 James M. Buchanan to Rutledge Vining, 25 July 1974, reprinted in Levy and Peart, Towards an Economics of Natural Equals, 131–4, at 133.

73 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 124, 125, emphasis in the original.

74 John Rawls to James M. Buchanan, 28 June 1972, Folder 6, Box 19, Rawls Papers.

75 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 132–4.

76 John Rawls to James M. Buchanan, 16 July 1976, Folder 10, Box 19, Rawls Papers. For Buchanan's critique of Nozick see Buchanan, James M., “Utopia, the Minimal State and Entitlement,” Public Choice 23/1 (1975), 121–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; we return to Buchanan's differences with Nozick below.

77 Rawls to Buchanan, 28 June 1972.

78 Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again,” 178–82; Rawls, “Justice as Reciprocity,” 209.

79 Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, 43.

80 Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, 7; James M. Buchanan, “The Foundations of Normative Individualism,” in Buchanan, The Economics and Ethics of Constitutional Order (Ann Arbor, 1991), 221–30.

81 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 127, 128. On the Warren Court see Lucas A. Powe Jr, The Warren Court and American Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2000). For Buchanan's hostility to the Warren Court see Fleury and Marciano, “The Making of a Constitutionalist,” 511–48.

82 Buchanan, “Rawls on Justice as Fairness,” 128.

83 Buchanan, James M., “Student Revolts, Academic Liberalism and Constitutional Attitudes,” Social Research 35/4 (1968), 666–80Google Scholar, at 673.

84 Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,” in Geoffrey Hawthorn, ed., In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, 2005), 1–17; Sen, Amartya, “What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?”, Journal of Philosophy 103/5 (2006), 215–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, 2007).

85 Rawls to Buchanan, 28 June 1972.

86 Ibid.

87 Knight, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” 285, 334, 347–8.

88 Barry, Brian, “Review of The Limits of Liberty and Freedom in Constitutional Contract,” Theory and Decision 12/1 (1980), 95–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 101.

89 Reisman, James Buchanan, 77–81; John Meadowcroft, James Buchanan (London, 2013), 24–31; Gordon Tullock, ed., Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg, VA, 1972); and Tullock, ed., Further Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg, VA, 1974).

90 James M. Buchanan, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, vol. 7, The Limits of Liberty (Indianapolis, 2000; first published 1975), 96–135, 209–14, quote at 210. For references to Knight see ibid., ix, xvii, 118, 209.

91 Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, 221–2. For a more detailed discussion and reconstruction of Buchanan's ideas of realism and feasibility see Alan Hamlin, “Constitutional, Political and Behavioral Feasibility,” in Wagner, James M. Buchanan, 337–58.

92 John Rawls to James M. Buchanan, 5 July 1984, Folder 9, Box 39, Rawls Papers. Though Rawls did not show how to transition from nonideal to ideal theory, Part III of A Theory of Justice is not a pure exercise in ideal theory either since Rawls considered there whether full compliance can be assured in a well-ordered society rather than assuming full compliance to begin with.

93 Martin, Isaac William, The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics (Stanford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Buchanan, James M., “The Potential for Taxpayer Revolt in American Democracy,” Social Science Quarterly 59/4 (1979), 691–6Google Scholar; Buchanan, James and Brennan, Geoffrey, The Power to Tax (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar.

95 Buchanan, James M. and Bush, Winston C., “Political Constraints on Contractual Redistribution,” American Economic Review 64/2 (1974), 153–7Google Scholar; Buchanan, James M., “The Justice of Natural Liberty,” Journal of Legal Studies 5/1 (1976), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buchanan, James M. and Faith, Roger L., “Subjective Elements in Rawlsian Contractual Agreement on Distributional Rules,” Economic Inquiry 18/1 (1980), 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Buchanan, James M., “A Hobbesian Interpretation of the Rawlsian Difference Principle,” Kyklos 29/1 (1976), 5–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 21, 23.

97 John Rawls to James Buchanan, 25 Feb. 1975, Folder 10, Box 19, Rawls Papers.

98 For a similar example of Rawls making this point in 1973 see Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 126.

99 James M. Buchanan, “Fairness, Hope and Justice,” in Roger Skurski, ed., New Directions in Economic Justice (Notre Dame, 1983), 53–69, at 69; Knight is discussed in ibid., at 58–9, 66–7; Buchanan, “Justice of Natural Liberty,” 11–15; James M. Buchanan, “Political Equality and Private Property: The Distributional Paradox,” in Gerald Dworkin, Gordon Bermant and Peter G. Brown, eds., Markets and Morals (London, 1977), 70–72.

100 Buchanan, “Justice of Natural Liberty,” 16.

101 Ibid. For Simons see his Economic Policy for a Free Society (Chicago, 1948); Jackson, Ben, “At the Origins of Neo-liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, c.1930–47,” Historical Journal 53/1 (2010), 135–6Google Scholar, 142–5; Burgin, Great Persuasion, 39–43, 51–3.

102 Lister, “Markets, Desert and Reciprocity,” 53–4; Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 88–90.

103 Rawls, “Distributive Justice,” 142. Rawls cited Hayek's Constitution of Liberty in making this point—see ibid. 142 n. 5.

104 John Rawls notes on James M. Buchanan, “Rules for a Fair Game,” 19 Nov., no year [c.1985], Folder 5, Box 45, Rawls Papers, 5–6, at 6 (second side).

105 Buchanan, “Political Equality,” 81. This was a key difference between Buchanan and later “left-libertarianism.” Otsuka, Michael, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fried, Barbara, “Left-Libertarianism: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32/1 (2004), 66–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Fried, “Unwritten Theory of Justice,” 444; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, 1974).

107 Buchanan, “Utopia, the Minimal State and Entitlement,” 125.

108 We are grateful to Alan Hamlin for emphasizing this point with respect to Buchanan.