Markets, law, and moral imaginations: order theory redux

The relationship among markets, morals, and law is the subject of what is now known as constitutional political economy as articulated by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962), though this set of ideas was articulated to similar effect in Walter Eucken's (1952) exposition of social order as entailing interaction among political, moral, and economic orders. In contrast, conventional economic theory operates with a uniplanar model of society where the relevant entities are markets and states, and with states governing markets. In contrast, this chapter construes society as featuring interactions across three distinct but interrelated modes of existence through interaction among the institutional orders of economics, politics, and morals.