This draws upon a paper presented at AAPSS panel at Eastern APA, Atlanta, December, 1989 in a panel on Jan Narveson's The Libertarian Idea, an earlier version of which was given at a Brown Bag luncheon at the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University. I would like to thank Jan Narveson for his comments at the APA, and Tyler Cowen, David Schmidtz, Christopher Morris, John Majewski and the referees of this journal for their criticism and suggestions.

1. See, for example, Buchanan, James, The Limits of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Freedom in Constitutional Contract (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and also Social Philosophy and Policy, 5, Number 2: Gauthier's New Social Contract; Narveson, Jan, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Schmidtz, David, The Limits of Government (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).Google Scholar Those interested in Buchanan's approach should also compare Vanberg, Viktor, “Individual Choice and Institutional Constraints,” Analyse & Kritik 8 (1986): 113–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; his Morality and Economics: De moribus est disputandum, Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Original Papers No. 7, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1988; and Buchanan, J. and Vanberg, V., “Rational Choice and Moral Order,” Analyse & Kritik 10 (1988): 138–60.Google Scholar

2. Any reader whose exposure to rational choice theory or to economics has rendered him incapable of recalling what a sui generis understanding of morality is like, might consult Mcnaughton's, DavidMoral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar

3. See, for example, Buchanan, “Politics and Science,” in Freedom in Constitutional Contract.

4. Gauthier, , Morals by Agreement, p. 269.Google Scholar

5. On which compare my “The Right to Subsistence in a Lockean' State of Nature,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Winter 1989.

6. I have found Simmonds, N. E., “Natural Law,” The New Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1987)Google Scholar, and Haakonssen, Knud, “Natural Law,” in Encyclope dia of Ethics, ed. Becker, Lawrence C., 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 2: 884–90Google Scholar, particularly helpful in this context.

7. Narveson, Jan, ‘The Justice of the Market: Comments on Gray and Radin,” in Markets and Justice: Nomos XXXI, ed. Chapman, J. and Pennock, J. R. (New York: New York University Press, 1989), pp. 250–76; see p. 263.Google Scholar

8. On this as a problem for Hayek's, indirect utilitarianism, compare the first half of my “From Dialogue Rights to Property Rights,” Critical Review 4, nos. 1 and 2 (1990).Google Scholar

9. Compare Buchanan, , Limits of Liberty, pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

10. Compare Gauthier, David, “Morality, Rational Choice, and Semantic Representation: A Reply to My Critics,” in Social Philosophy and Policy 5 (1988): 173–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see page 205.

11. Compare Schmidtz, Limits of Government, chap. 7.

12. Narveson, , Libertarian Idea, p. 134.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 178, quoting Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13.

14. Leviathan, chap. 13, first paragraph.

15. See David Gauthier, Morals By Agreement, chap. 9, sections 5.2 and 5.3

16. Actually, this is not strictly true; for Narveson notes that “those who have children... are connected to their own children with emotional ties” (pp. 270–71); and he says some reassuring things about his relations with his cat. Have moral intuitions, banished through the front door, crept in through the back under another name?

17. Native Americans were sometimes misrepresented as being exclusively hunter-gatherers, in part, it seems, to make it appear as if their claims to their land were not good, on the grounds that their activity did not involve the “mixing of labor.” (One might anyway think that it was “no accident” that it is farmers who champion a theory in which land ownership is achieved through the mixing of labor with land, rather than, say, by the habitual hunting or the grazing of cattle or sheep over it.)

18. Compare Rousseau's discussion in The Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 8, and the replacement of “possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier” by “property, which can be founded only on a positive title.”

19. The idea is, in fact, not unlike the “rent” theories of exploitation which posed such problems for classical liberals at the end of the nineteenth century. Compare, on this, Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridg University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

20. This notion has been discussed in various public lectures, and my account is based on these informal presentations. Buchanan has, I understand, since discussed it in his The Economics and Ethics of Constitutional Order (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991)Google Scholar, but this book was not yet available when the present article was written.

21. See Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, chap. 9, section 4.3.

22. See, for the ideas about the task of reductive explanation applied in the context of the philosophy of mind, Karl Popper's contributions to Popper, Karl and Eocles, J. C., The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer International, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Compare, for example, Sayre-mccord, Geoffrey, ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; David McNaughton, Moral Vision; and O.brink, David, Moral Realism and the Foundatioris of Ethics (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Compare, for a preliminary sketch of how this might be done, my “Epistemological Limits of the State,” Political Studies, 1990, pp. 116–25.

25. Compare Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, Glasgow Edition, volume 2, part 5, section 1, p. 795.Google Scholar For further discussion, see my “AdamSmith and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Adam Smith's Legacy, ed. Elliott, N. (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1990), pp. 135–49.Google Scholar

26. Compare Haakonssen, Knud, “Natural law and Moral Realism,” In Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Stewart, S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 61–85Google Scholar, and also some unpublished work of the present author's.

27. On which compare Popper's, Karl “The Aim of Science,” for example in his Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).Google Scholar

28. Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene (London: Paladin Books, 1978).Google Scholar

29. Compare Trivers, R. J., “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Axelrod, R., The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar

30. Compare Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation, and some unpublished work by Viktor Vanberg and Roger Congleton.

31. Compare the discussion of “Plato's Beard” in Karl Popper's “A Realist View of Logic, Physics and History,” in his Objective Knowledge.

32. Compare Popper's, Karl “Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science” (1974), published as an addendum to his The Open Universe (Totowa, NJ: Roman and littlefield, 1982).Google Scholar

33. For some discussion of these issues, compare my “Subjectivism” in Austrian Economics: Tensions and New Directions, ed. Boehm, S. and Caldwell, B. (forthcoming); and my “Schutz, Machlup, and Rational Economic Man” (Paper delivered at the History of Economics Society, College Park, MD, 06 1991).Google Scholar

34. See now, for some relevant discussion, Vallentyne, Peter, ed., Contractarianism and Rational Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. This book, however, was published too recently to be taken account of in the present article.