CONCLUSION
This chapter has made the following points:
1. Unanimous agreement to a particular set of constitutional principles, or to the terms of a transaction, is believed to offer a foolproof foundation for a constitutional order or market exchange because every person sanctions its coming to pass.18
2.
There are two ways to consider the power of unanimity. On the one hand, if individuals signal that they agree to an outcome by voting or accepting terms of exchange, then their ratification demonstrates their endorsement of the collectively shared outcome. On the other hand, unanimous agreement can be understood to signify that if actors’ preference rankings over outcomes are known from their stated preferences or behavior, then a policy maker can design laws and institutions to best accommodate their interests using this information.3. Even though James M. Buchanan follows Knut Wicksell’s school of economic thought, he deviates by adopting an understanding of unanimity that reflects an actor’s behavior at the moment of choice instead of objectively discerning an analysis of the costs and benefits of producing a collective product tailor-made to actors’ stated interests or observed choices.
4. Even though minimalist and therefore attractive, Buchanan’s approach ends up treating the achievement of unanimous agreement as fleeting and dependent on particular circumstances. Even if original actors agreed that one mutually cooperative outcome is better than mutual defection, an individual, in seeing a more attractive third choice, may cancel his or her prior agreement as a holdout move to achieve a better outcome. Thus, actors may initially agree that one point on the Pareto frontier of mutually beneficial outcomes is superior to mutual defection, yet another outcome could be introduced that may lead an individual to veto the previous pairwise choice to achieve a better outcome.
5. Furthermore, as is the standard difficulty with the Prisoner’s Dilemma resulting from the fact that each individual is better off defecting from an
1 8 On the traditional power of unanimous agreement to secure a constitutional order see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, (London: Routledge, 1978), 444. agreement, regardless of what the other does, no agreement motivates compliance.
6. Thus, whereas for classic liberals, unanimous agreement over elementary principles (such as guiding action in accordance with the Pareto principle of making at least one person better off and no one worse off) compels action, and the status quo disagreement outcome is defined in accordance to the no-harm principle, in a neoliberal regime unanimity over either principles or outcomes lacks any motivational force, and actors will strategize their votes and bargaining terms in ways that either manipulate the best-worst outcome for others or veto otherwise agreeable outcomes to achieve an even more attractive outcome by risking mutual defection.
7. In all circumstances, actors only comply if they face punitive sanctions for defecting.