An Overview of the Contractarian Public Finance of James Buchanan

Abstract

Although it is only in the last ten or fifteen years that James Buchanan has emphasized a contractarian approach to public policy analysis, most of his nearly 40 years of work in the area of public finance exhibits contractarian themes. This paper outlines Professor Buchanan's contractarian approach to policy analysis, and applies it to various topics in public finance in order to demonstrate the underlying unity of his work. Many of Buchanan's most original contributions to public finance can be best understood as a consequence of his contractarian perspective.