James M. Buchanan’s constitutional project: past and future

Abstract

A substantial amount of James Buchanan’s academic work was devoted to his constitutional project: the development of procedures for designing constitutional rules that would create a government sufficient to protect people’s rights but that would constrain government from violating people’s rights. Buchanan divides government functions into a protective state that preserves people’s rights and a productive state that produces collective goods that individuals could not produce on their own or through market mechanisms. Buchanan uses the benchmark of hypothetical agreement with the constitutional rules to evaluate whether they further the interests of those who are subject to them. This paper presents Buchanan’s constitutional project as a framework for analyzing constitutional rules and suggests how Buchanan’s framework can extend his constitutional project.