Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

The objective of this note is to revisit the meaningfulness of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and apply it to the recent debate on liberal paternalism and consumer protection. The CJT con-sists of two parts, (a) stating that a jury of experts is always more competent than a single expert given...

Buchanan mentions at several points in his oeuvre the necessary role for a ‘constitutional attitude' – at the individual (‘the private man') and social level (‘the public man'). Buchanan's constitutional attitude is both explanatory and evaluative; it explains why citizens value liberty...