No salvation through constitutions: Jasay versus Buchanan and Rawls

Limited-government advocate James M. Buchanan and welfare-state apologist John Rawls stated in radically different ways that constitutions could be designed to provide enduring salvation to an otherwise doomed political community. Anthony de Jasay challenged this conclusion by pointing out that individuals, groups, and majorities operate under the same assumptions in the domain of constitutional politics as they do in ordinary politics. The analytical relevance of Anthony de Jasay's contribution was illustrated with two symmetrical constitutional cases of the US and Portugal.