ALBERTO VANNUCCI

Scambio politico ed economia soggettivista.

Il contrattualismo procedurale di James Buchanan  

N. 178

Summary — This paper analyzes Buchanan’s subjectivist approach to economics and its derivation from the Austrian conception of "opportunity cost" as a methodological basis of his political theory. Stressing the dimension of exchange and the institutional role of markets in human interaction, Buchanan associates the "objective" notion of cost with some of the "rational-constructivist" risks of a predictive and, indeed, normative social science. In his theoretical perspective it is instead possible to study, within an individualistic framework, the process that brings rules of human conduct to existence, in the economic as in the political sphere, and the role played by voluntary agreements concerning the "rules of the game". Buchanan’s contractarian approach — in the version of an unanimous agreement for constitutional reform — reconciles a subjectivist notion of value with a theory of social order which can explain both the formation of the State and a potential solution to the many "prisoner’s dilemmas " of modern representative democracies. On the other hand, the success of such complex political exchanges — that present some similarities with their analogous in the economic market — requires that individuals are put behind a "veil of uncertainty" concerning their future position, or the pre-existence of "moral order": as a set of ethical values and attitudes concerning the fair and just procedure for approving the "rules of the games", its spontaneous emergence can also be explained in "hayekian" terms.