Among James M. Buchanan’s most important contributions to modern political economy is his work in political theory. With a unique combination of economic analysis and insight into fundamental aspects of social organization, Buchanan’s “constitutional political economy” places rules and rule-following at the center of socio-political life. While Buchanan’s constitutional leanings can be traced to his very earliest works, published in the 1940s and 1950s, his constitutional approach first takes substantial shape with Tullock in The Calculus of Consent (1962). His next great work in constitutionalism is The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975). What is most interesting for our purposes is that there exists a fundamental tension, which has been largely ignored even by his advocates, between the earlier constitutional work, Calculus, and the later work Limits. Calculus, in Buchanan’s words, is “optimistic” in its outlook for constructive political organization, while Limits is considerably less so ([2000] 1975: 10). We attempt to contribute to an account of Buchanan’s evolutionary political thinking between these two works.

Specifically, this paper examines Buchanan’s intellectual development between Calculus and Limits by focusing upon several of his lesser-known works on higher education in the 1960s. We trace several key concepts that Buchanan would come to fully develop and analyze in Limits. For example, we show that Academia in Anarchy (with Devletoglou, 1970) and “The ‘Social’ Efficiency of Education” (1970) cast informal social norms in a central role in the maintenance of social order. These ideas, moreover, anticipated the notion of “ordered anarchy” that would be later expressed in Limits. We also demonstrate that Buchanan explored a version of law-aspublic-capital in Academia before he expanded on the concept in Limits. Finally, we show that Buchanan had a concern for the inheritors of constitutions in “Student Revolts, Academic Liberalism, and Constitutional Attitudes” (1968) that surfaced as the “second generation” problem in Limits. We conclude that Buchanan’s lesser-known work on education served a pivotal role in exploring and developing the constitutional thinking he later expressed in considerably more nuanced form in Limits.