Social Contracts and Historical Rules

The public choice-school has explained why policy- making is generally disappointing and frequently against the very interest of the public at large. The economics profession has put forward two kinds of allegedly free-market remedies. On the one hand, the mainstream view underscores the need for more expert advice and better agency rules. On the other, the constitutional standpoint emphasizes the role of meta-rules founded on a social contract, so that abuse can be restrained, if not eliminated. This paper questions the foundations of the new contractarian views, which hardly escape the consequentialist and utilitarian problems raised by the orthodox approach to policy- making. In particular, it is argued that in order to understand the nature of today’s policy- making, rational constructivism is of little help; competing explanations, such as those offered by the institutional or the evolutionary schools, are similarly ineffective. The insufficiencies of the mainstream approaches suggest an alternative. We develop the idea that “First Principles” – that is those set of ideas that have characterized Western Civilization during the past two millennia – provide a better lens for understanding the role and characteristics of policy-making.