Realism and Deliberation in Constitutional Political Economy: The Fruitful Intellectual Dialogue between James Buchanan and John Rawls (original) (raw)

Constitutional political economy has an explanatory and a justificatory strand. The former explains how alternative sets of rules and institutions give rise to different forms of social interaction; the latter tries to justify and give normative foundation to rules and institutions within a liberal contractarian tradition. Here, the central question is: What types of rules and institutions can we imagine emerging from a consensual constitutional contract of individuals? It is the justificatory-normative strand of constitutional political economy that we focus on in this paper by entering into a dialogue between two of the most prominent proponents of this approach, James Buchanan and John Rawls. In spite of their different political leanings, their respective approaches share a surprising amount of commonalities. However, we think it is the tensions between their approaches-in particular in the context of (psychological) realism and (public) deliberation-which provide us with an enlightening take on the question of how to conduct normative constitutional political economy in contemporary times. We start this article with Buchanan's critique of Rawls's theory, in particular his accusation that Rawls's account would be unrealistic assuming people's reasonableness and too normative in predefining the outcome of constitutional choice. In spite of this valid critique, Buchanan's own theory does not provide a satisfying answer to the challenges he identifies in Rawls, partially due to the methodological constraints he imposes on his own reasoning. We argue in this paper that the solution to Buchanan's critique is actually an updated and expanded reading of Rawls's later work on democratic deliberation and public reasoning.