The Art of the State, State of the Art

Abstract

James Buchanan’s constitutional political economy is much closer to what the philosophers of classical antiquity called an “art” than to what the philosophers and practitioners of modem times would call a “science”. Buchanan has sometimes spoken of the scientifically-minded statistical endeavors of modem social science pejoratively as “proving that water flows downhill”. Nevertheless, Buchanan would think of himself as “slipping down the hill” if he ever accepted the anti-empiricism and a priori methods of Ludwig von Mieses and some of the more extreme Austrian economists. There is empirical content in economics but it is more or less as trivial as the empirical content of insights like “water flows downhill”.