Bukantianism—Buchanan's philosophical economics

This paper reconstructs how Buchanan himself answers his question “what should economists do?” The way Buchanan tries to stir a middle course between the extremes of an a priori logic of human action and economic behaviorism is sketched as broadly Kantian. Other than a conventional Kantian, Buchanan's game theoretically inspired “dual worlds”-approach, as reconstructed, is fully compatible with a scientific world view. However, bringing together “political philosophy and predictive science”, Bukantianism has to cope with remaining tensions between the empirical and the normative.

► Buchanan is a Kantian throughout. ► Bukantianism amounts to “merging” game theory as theory of behavior with game theory as decision logic. ► The normative content of Bukantianism goes beyond its claim to science.