This paper traces the normative side of James Buchanan's individualist-subjectivist-contractarian position. The literature on anarchy and radical self-governance treats Buchanan's position, and social contract theory more generally, as a rival rather than allied branch of analysis. However, I...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun from the perspective of Virginia Political Economy. Specifically, this paper argues that Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority offers a way of operationalizing the "generality norm" of Buchanan and...

Tullock (2005, p. 160) notes that the perceived robust relationship between democracy and economic progress is due mostly to assumption, rather than analysis. Taking up Tullock's challenge to consider the relationship between economic progress and other political forms, we re-assess the...

This paper develops the theory of entangled political economy by outlining a process by which the political-economic order can become increasingly entangled. The theory posits that a Big Player polity organization, a key feature of which is a lack of a hard budget constraint, exports this...

I develop a positive theory of sovereignty that is rooted in political exchange. The key concept I use to characterize sovereignty is self-enforcing exchange of political rights. I conclude that a sovereign is an individual or body party to political exchange that does not rest on third-party...

I develop the idea of malignant monetary monocentricity: that contemporary central banks are systematically unlikely to deliver macroeconomic stability due to institutionally entrenched information and incentive problems. I also argue that polycentric monetary systems, best approximated by...

We argue James M. Buchanan's scholarship provides us an exemplary model for doing liberal political economy. Levy (2014) argues there are irreconcilable tensions within liberalism between rationalism and pluralism. Buchanan navigates these tensions in a way that powered one of the most important...

We develop a theory of financial stability based on insights from the literature on polycentric governance and institutional resilience. We contend that top-down regulatory approaches to achieving financial stability will prove ineffective, due to various knowledge and incentive problems. In...

The problem of financial stability is political and institutional, rather than narrowly economic. To achieve a more resilient financial system, we need to pay attention to the incentives of actors who have the power to act discretionarily, and to the knowledge limitations of such actors in the...

I develop a theory of sovereign entrepreneurship, which is a special kind of political entrepreneurship. Sovereignty is rooted in self-enforced exchange of political property rights. Sovereign entrepreneurship is the creative employment of political property rights to advance a plan. Building on...