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The Political Implications of the Public Choice - Property Rights School*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Norman Furniss
Norman Furniss*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Abstract

The public choice-property rights perspective is an important intellectual movement aimed at refurbishing and broadening the scope of classical microeconomic reasoning. This paper assesses the political implications of the “school”–its ability both to generate significant political insights and hypotheses and to use political arguments and findings to buttress the assumptions of microeconomic theory.

I conclude that, in the main, neither effort realizes its goal. What we do find revealed by a study of the political implications of the perspective is a well-developed, if generally unacknowledged, normative position, a position that deflects attention from the major sources of power in society and thus complicates the articulation of prescriptions or recommendation statements.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 399 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1978

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgments: I want to thank Alfred Diamant, Timothy Hennessey, Trudi Miller, Arthur Schweitzer, and the three referees for the American Political Science Review for their incisive and helpful comments. My work on property rights in particular and the institution of property in general has been advanced by a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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