Constitutions - in a political sense - provide solutions to the age old problem of leadership changes and how majorities and minorities should interact. If political communities solve these problems the can better coordinate their efforts, which in turn will give them a competitive advantage (military, fiscal, economic, etc.) to other (less coordinated) political communities. This chapter looks into the political effects constitutions have, and how they try to calibrate these kind of balances. It also look into the possibilities of calculating or engineering (new) balances like this, for instance for divided societies and transitional democracies (constitutional engineering)

A central question for Buchanan was whether the social world is characterized by natural differences, as Plato argued, or natural equals, as Smith posited. Smith’s characterization of the fundamental equality of people in terms of street porter and philosopher is a commonplace in Buchanan’s writings. This issue speaks to how social goals are determined. The chapter includes the initial exchange of letters between Rawls and Buchanan beginning when Rawls wrote to Buchanan and Tullock after discovering Calculus of Consent. Rawls pointed out that Calculus makes an implicit egalitarian assumption – one that would preoccupy Buchanan over the rest of his life. Buchanan compared Rawls’s Theory of Justice with Smith’s work in two essays separated by nearly thirty years. In the first (in 1975), Buchanan dealt with the stereotyped reading of Smith in which Smith supported the masters of mankind who everywhere and always collude to maintain low wages; Buchanan argued that Smith and Rawls were closer than one might think. In the second essay (in 2004), new Smith scholarship allowed Buchanan to refine the theme of natural equals and to demonstrate the fundamental equivalence of their theories.