Abstract
There are three main foundations of Public Choice theory: methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and “politics as exchange.” The first two are represented in nearly all work that identifies as “Public Choice,” but politics as exchange is often forgotten or de-emphasized. This paper—adapted from a lecture given on the occasion of the 30th year after Buchanan’s Nobel Prize—fleshes out Buchanan’s theory of politics as exchange, using four notions that are uniquely central to his thought: philosophical anarchism, ethical neutrality, subjectivism, and the “relatively absolute absolutes.” A central tension in Buchanan’s work is identified, in which he seems simultaneously to argue both that nearly anything agreed to by a group could be enforced within the group as a contract, and that there are certain types of rules and arrangements, generated by decentralized processes, that serve human needs better than state action. It is argued that it is a mistake to try to reconcile this tension, and that both parts of the argument are important.
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Notes
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, over the long course of his career Buchanan gave a number of requirements describing what is sufficient to justify coercion, and described a variety of tasks for “What should political economists do?” (to paraphrase Buchanan 1964). In the description of the Thomas Jefferson Center Buchanan argues that the task of political economy is to find that institutional configuration that engenders productive specialization and peaceful cooperation among free men. The second task is to address the philosophical issues that underlie all discussions of these institutional arrangements and the appropriate role of government. The first task fits with a long standing Buchanan claim of influence from Routledge Vinning --- that we never choose between distributions, but always between rules of the game that engender a pattern of exchange, production and distribution. In this sense, one could argue--As Pete Boettke correctly pointed out in reacting to rather stark claim about consent above--that Buchanan did at least on occasion, and early in his career, have considerable optimism about a “productive state” rather than just a protective state.
One could argue that Buchanan was one of the most creative innovators present at the founding of public choice, but that his approach was in fact not pursued because the desire for operationalizability went much more in the direction of what Buchanan often called “that empirical nonsense.” For an even-handed review of Public Choice as a literature, including quite a bit of that “empirical nonsense,” see Mueller (2003).
It may be worth examining Lekachman’s dismissal of Hayek. Myrdal has collected a very respectable 17,000 professional citations, but Hayek has more than 90,000 and the total is still growing rapidly. Revenge is perhaps a dish best served in footnotes...
One could plausibly object that Buchanan elsewhere wrote of normative individualism (e.g., Buchanan 1991) and that’s true. But the normative claim is not part of the “method” of Public Choice.
I have discussed the problem of “truly” voluntary, or euvoluntary, exchange elsewhere (Munger 2011).
It is for this reason that the journal Public Choice was originally entitled Papers in Non-Market Decision-Making.
The author acknowledges discussions with Geoffrey Brennan, particularly at the Australasian Public Choice Society meetings in December 2016, for clarifying this argument.
The current paper is derived from a public lecture, and it does not go into much detail in terms of background and references. The reader interested in learning more about the underpinnings of Buchanan’s political philosophy might look at Kliemt (2004, 2011) for a much more rigorous and organized overview and critique.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (emphasis added):
[P]hilosophical anarchists...maintain that it is impossible to provide a satisfactory account of a general obligation to obey the law. According to Robert Paul Wolff, the principal advocate of this view, there can be no general obligation to obey the law because any such obligation would violate the “primary obligation” of autonomy, which is “the refusal to be ruled” (1998 [1970], p. 18). As Wolff defines it, autonomy combines freedom with responsibility. To be autonomous, someone must have the capacity for choice, and therefore for freedom; but the person who has this capacity also has the responsibility to exercise it — to act autonomously. Failing to do so is to fail to fulfill this “primary obligation” of autonomy.
This primary obligation dooms any attempt to develop a theory of political obligation, Wolff argues, except in the highly unlikely case of a direct democracy in which every law has the unanimous approval of the citizenry. Under any other form of government, autonomy and authority are simply incompatible. Authority is “the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed” (p. 4), which entails that anyone subject to authority has an obligation to obey those who have the right to be obeyed. But if we acknowledge such an authority, we allow someone else to rule us, thereby violating our fundamental obligation to act autonomously. We must therefore reject the claim that we have an obligation to obey the orders of those who purport to hold authority over us and conclude that there can be no general obligation to obey the laws of any polity that falls short of a unanimous direct democracy.
One source from which a doctrine of “tacit consent” is often derived is Rousseau. But even in the passage where Rousseau seems to argue for tacit consent there is a famous footnote that foreshadows Buchanan’s view on exit. If one takes the footnote seriously, the qualification mitigates much of the force of the argument.
There is but one law which, from its nature, needs unanimous consent. This is the social compact; for civil association is the most voluntary of all acts. Every man being born free and his own master, no one, under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man subject without his consent…
If then there are opponents when the social compact is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. When the State is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign. *
FOOTNOTE: This should of course be understood as applying to a free State; for elsewhere family, goods, lack of a refuge, necessity, or violence may detain a man in a country against his will; and then his dwelling there no longer by itself implies his consent to the contract or to its violation. (Du C.S., Book IV, Chapter 2)
David Hume (1987) famously responded to this and other arguments for “tacit consent:”
Should it be said, that, by living under the dominion of a prince, which one might leave, every individual has given his tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience; it may be answered, that such an implied consent can only have a place, where a man imagines that the matter depends on his choice. . .Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?
We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master, though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish the moment he leaves her. --from “Of the Original Contract” (originally published in 1748)
If Rousseau can be taken seriously in the footnote (he did not use that many footnotes, in Social Contract or elsewhere), then it is not clear that Rousseau and Hume really are at opposite ends of the spectrum, as is often claimed.
From the interview with Geoffrey Brennan (Buchanan and Brennan 2001; part 1, at 14:10):
[We need to go back to] the libertarian strand... There is no justification for anyone coercing anybody else. If you are not going to coerce someone, what can you do? You exchange with them, you engage in reciprocal relationships, one person with another person, and you build that up. You start getting more complex and more complex and ultimately you end up in a situation where we are participating in a big exchange, in which we are all sharing in a commonality of a government, of politics, and so forth. You start with the idea that coercion is never justified in advance, on any grounds. Unless you can bring in some transcendental purpose, how can you justify coercion? Unless God’s rules, or “right reason,” or [some a priori doctrine] justifies force, you can’t have coercion. If you say, “No, values start with us,” start with the individuals, then how can one individual legitimately coerce another?
As Brennan (2015, p. 8) puts it:
Buchanan often insists that any normatively guided action—any attempt at improvement—must “start from where we are”. At one level, this claim could be read as a simple analytical requirement: it is difficult to imagine how one could start from anywhere else! But in Buchanan’s hands the requirement has a more normative cast. It is a feature of his contractarian approach that normative desirability is grounded in agreement—with the natural thought that individuals will not agree to changes that make them worse off (all things considered).
For more description of this argument, see Richman (2013).
For a lively and entertaining description of Buchanan’s graduate days see Boettke (2013; pp. 43–47).
“This same [spirit or will of knowing] has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its “digestive power”…” Nietzsche (1997; p. 98).
Interestingly, this very closely connects to Rousseau’s view of “residence implies consent,” discussed in footnote 7 above.
It is possible to argue that Buchanan also considered consent necessary, in the sense of fully justifying political authority. But this problem is made moot by Buchanan’s other notion, ethical neutrality (“we start from where we are”). We are bound by the rules we have, even if we did not consent to them, but we are allowed to question and change those rules, because nothing is sacrosanct.
This raises an issue I don’t think Buchanan ever took a position on: should an individual be allowed to sell him/herself into slavery, voluntarily, if the other conditions for valid contract are met? He came pretty close to justifying “voluntary slavery” in Buchanan (1991; pp. 289–291). For an evaluation of the arguments on this question outside of Buchanan’s thought, see Block (2003).
If you doubt he meant this, check his statements in Buchanan (1959). He didn’t always practice the view that others might reasonably disagree, but it was generally true for him as a matter of policy. The exception was his utter rejection of the radicalism of the 1960s, as discussed in Buchanan and Devletoglou (1970). Those people rioting at the universities were not reasonable, in Buchanan’s view. As Buchanan and Devletoglou put it, in the Preface (p. vi): “What seems to be needed most at this point is less talk from the top of soft heads and more thought in hard heads.”
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the Mercatus/George Mason symposium “40 Years After the Nobel,” in Fairfax, VA on October 6, 2016, and again at a plenary session of the Australasian Public Choice Society meetings at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, December 9, 2016. The comments received after those two sessions were invaluable in extending, and in several cases correcting, portions of the paper. I wish to thank Michael Brooks, Keith Dowding, Timothy Groseclose, Jonathan Pincus, David Schmidtz, Barry Weingast, and Larry White for helpful comments. Two guides offered nearly heroic aid and suggestions: Peter Boettke and Chris Coyne, and the finished paper uses many of their suggestions verbatim without (other than herein) acknowledgement. Finally, since it goes without saying it must be said: the errors the paper still contains are no one’s fault by mine.
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Munger, M.C. 30 years after the nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy. Rev Austrian Econ 31, 151–167 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-018-0418-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-018-0418-3