Thinking with models: an inescapable conundrum

Public choice has worked with an inadequate scheme of thought where the options for governance are reduced to markets and states. This chapter avoids that dichotomy by recognizing that humans are social creatures who form a rich variety of social relationships of precedence and subordination. People will be governed by other people, but it is an open question just how those governing relationships are established. Such thinkers from a century ago as Friedrich von Wieser and Bertrand de Jouvenel explained that power is not so much an imposition by one person on another as it is a manifestation of human sentiments that emerge from within particular human patterns of social organization. Nations typically have structured patterns of governance, and with those patterns themselves being subject to choice and modification. Those patterns, moreover, are more responsive to intensely held desires than to lofty philosophical expressions of optimally or justice.