Abstract

Buchanan’s approach to political economy is often characterized as rejecting romance in favour of realism: as taking feasibility seriously. But Buchanan provides no detailed account of his understanding of feasibility. This chapter discusses the idea of feasibility and its role at the constitutional, political and individual levels of Buchanan’s work, offers a reconstruction of Buchanan’s position on feasibility based on the idea of politics as exchange, and locates that position in the context of the more recent discussion of the concept of feasibility in the political philosophy literature.