Limits of Liberty, The (Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, The) [Hardcover]

James M. Buchanan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0865972257 | ISBN-13: 978-0865972254

Published originally in 1975, The Limits of Liberty made James Buchanan’s name more widely known than ever before among political philosophers and theorists and established Buchanan, along with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, as one of the three new contractarians, standing on the shoulders of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant.

While The Limits of Liberty is strongly related to Buchanan’s Calculus of Consent (Vol. 3 in Liberty Fund’s Collected Works of James M. Buchanan), it is logically prior to the Calculus, according to Hartmut Kliemt in the foreword, even though it was published later. As Kliemt states, “[The Limits of Liberty] characterizes the status quo from the point where Paretian politics starts and at the same time describes conceivable processes of interindividual agreement that might lead from a natural equilibrium to a political one.”

Buchanan frames the central idea most cogently in the opening of his preface: “Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a society of men and women who want to be free but who recognize the inherent limits that social interdependence places on them.”

James M. Buchanan is an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and one of the greatest scholars of liberty in the twentieth century.

The entire series will include:

Volume 1: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty
Volume 2: Public Principles of Public Debt
Volume 3: The Calculus of Consent
Volume 4: Public Finance in Democratic Process
Volume 5: The Demand and Supply of Public Goods
Volume 6: Cost and Choice
Volume 7: The Limits of Liberty
Volume 8: Democracy in Deficit
Volume 9: The Power to Tax
Volume 10: The Reason of Rules
Volume 11: Politics by Principle, Not Interest
Volume 12: Economic Inquiry and Its Logic
Volume 13: Politics as Public Choice
Volume 14: Debt and Taxes
Volume 15: Externalities and Public Expenditure Theory
Volume 16: Choice, Contract, and Constitutions
Volume 17: Moral Science and Moral Order
Volume 18: Federalism, Liberty, and the Law
Volume 19: Ideas, Persons, and Events
Volume 20: Indexes

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James M. Buchanan is an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and one of the greatest scholars of liberty in the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 261 pages
• Publisher: Liberty Fund (July 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865972257
• ISBN-13: 978-0865972254
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,908,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Contractarian theory of the state, October 14, 2004

By 

Jerry H. Tempelman "[e-mail]" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Paperback)

The book's thesis is two-fold
* Anarchy is undesirable if for no other reason than that adopting some public works will increase Pareto-efficiency (e.g. David Hume's famous illustration of the drainage of the village meadow: p. 49).
* Leviathan-like government is also undesirable. The reason is Buchanan's usual theme that if left unchecked (e.g. constitutionally), government will grow larger than is Pareto-efficient (ch. 6) due to dynamics of public choice (which are briefly touched upon on pp. 129-131 but worked out in far greater detail in The Calculus of Consent).

The topic of the appropriate role and size of government is approached from an economist's rather than a philosopher's perspective (e.g., pp. 11, 98 make this explicit). Considerations are therefore of efficiency rather than justice or philosophy. E.g., property rights are based on contract-type reasons rather than natural-law type reasons such as those argued by John Locke and Robert Nozick (pp. 76-77).

The book is persuasive in demonstrating that "even under the most favorable conditions the operation of democratic process may generate budgetary excess" and that "[d]emocracy may become its own Leviathan unless constitutional limits are imposed and enforced" (pp. 204-205). However, it does not explore where in between anarchy and Leviathan the optimal size of government lies, or even how to determine this point (he says so explicitly on p. 222). This is deliberate, in that Buchanan does not want to impose his views of his own preferred society on the rest of us (pp. 3, 210). But while this is understandable, it also leaves the book hopelessly wanting or uninteresting. The thesis that neither anarchy nor Leviathan is ideal is neither new nor controversial, and it is the where-in-between part that is interesting (on p. 227 Buchanan acknowledges that the alternative that falls in between anarchy and Leviathan must indeed be articulated). If we are expected to buy in to "ordered anarchy" (pp. 149, 169, 215, 228), it would be helpful to know what Buchanan means by "ordered".

Note: All page references are to the Collected Works edition (vol. 7).