James Buchanan the Great

Last week I attended the week-long seminar of Professor James Buchanan at The Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University (see here). Buchanan does not teach on a regular basis anymore, but every year he still comes to give a week-long seminar where he freely discusses with the students his contributions to economic science. In addition to Buchanan, Geoffrey Brennan gave two lectures and participated in the debates. David Levy supervised the week and, along with Hartmut Kliemt, played a key role in the discussions. Gordon Tullock attended the second day. Pete Boettke showed up for the discussion on Afraid to Be Free.

In spite of his age—he is 87—James Buchanan is still intellectually alert and active. For a whole week, Buchanan discussed with us his life-long themes, as well as his most recent views and research. Buchanan is one of the few great classical liberals of the last 50 years. He has made seminal contributions to economic science. Spending a week discussing with this Southern gentleman was a true reward in itself.

As far as the discussions are concerned, Buchanan talked about constitutional political economy and the Wicksellian approach, his Nobel Prize, the influence of Hayek’s thought in his work, the survival of socialism (Afraid to Be Free), and his more recent work on increasing returns. Here are a few ideas that Buchanan mentioned during the seminar and that stuck with me:

Constitutional political economy teaches us that the rules of the game matter more to obtain socially desirable outcomes than the strategy the players may adopt within a given set of rules. Buchanan used the poker game analogy: if poker players agree on rules before dealing the cards, a different set of rules (and thereby outcomes) will be decided than if they agree on rules once they have the cards in their hands (and thus know where they stand and which rules would favor each of them separately but not all of them as a social group).

“I am an optimist if I look backward, and I am a pessimist if I look forward.” Buchanan here means that he has often been happily surprised by the way things turned out in the past. For instance in the 1970s, no one could have predicted then that in less than a decade, the UK, the US, and New Zealand, among others, would have started radical policy changes. However, as he looks into the future, he sees the decline of classical liberal ideas.

In the 19th century, socialism offered the State as an alternative to God (and the family). Classical liberalism was not able to offer a viable alternative to the socialist ideal. Economists are, in large part, responsible for this state of affairs. They were not able to convince the general population that capitalism, as the embodiment of the principles of classical liberalism, is the only system that delivers the goods (the league tables are important in this respect).

On the distinction between law and legislation (dear to Hayek), Buchanan believes that judges should be finding the law, not “making” it. The analogy Buchanan likes to use is that of tennis players on a clay court. After hours of play, the lines become harder  and harder to see. However, in spite of this, the judge must act as if the lines were still there, he can’t move them around; he must act as if the lines were truly visible.

Buchanan sees himself neither as a relativist nor as an absolutist (in ethics and epistemology). He uses the famous Knightian position of the “relative absolute absolute.” This means that we can challenge the basic values that we operate on, but not all values are relative. While I don’t agree with this critical rationalist position, I was struck by the influence of Frank Knight on Buchanan.

Finally, my favorite is the idea of the market as the ultimate frontier. As long as there is freedom of entry and exit, anyone can always go and start his own business and engage in new trading activities. In this sense, the market is a virtual frontier. The analogy with the American West is here present. While he did not explicitly recognize the open-endedness of his view, I believe this is where the Misesian (and Kirznerian) influence in Buchanan’s work is most acute.

I wish James Buchanan many more years of fruitful research and discussions with his colleagues and students.

Comments

[KRMcKenzie]

I credit Buchanan as one of the authors that significantly changed my pattern of thought. I often want to suggest his writings for others but find that they'll be too technical for most of my non-economics minded friends. Can you suggest any shorter pieces by Buchanan that encapsulate some of his themes but were written for a broad audience?

...Of course, I could just be underestimating my friends.

[Rafe]

On the failure of economists to convince the public that free markets would deliver the goods, I have sugested that this is the "third wave" that Marxism surfed to success. http://conjecturesandrefutations.net/weblog/?p=189

The other two waves were the respect for science in progressive circles and the moral imperative to help the poor and the weak.

[Peter Boettke]

Kyle,

Prof. Buchanan mainly wrote for his fellow academics, but some of his statements about the liberal project are assessible to wider audiences. I like his The Soul of Classical Liberalism, which was published in the Independent Review, and I also really like this essay "The Potential and Limits of Socially Organized Humankind" which I think you can track down in his collected works at Liberty Fund.

Of course, if your friends have ethical theory, political theory, legal theory, methodology of the social sciences, then Buchanan has several works that are relevant and not just pure economics. Outside of Hayek, Buchanan has done more for establishing an interdisciplinary research program in economics and political economy in the 20th and 21st century. It is a great privilege to have studied with him and to have learned from him and as Fred says it is amazing to see just how intellectually vibrant he remains. And to be honest, that recent article of his "Afraid to be Free" is actually one of the most insightful pieces you could share with your friends.

Pete

[frederic]

Kyle,
To add to Pete's comment. Buchanan mentioned that in the early 1970s he wanted to write a book on classical liberalism for the general public. He didn't do it, as he couldn't find the inspiration. But what he ended up writing was "The Limits of Liberty" which is made for a general informed audience. You may want to check it out for you and your friends.
frederic

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

Ed Stringham presented his new edited book, "Anarchy, State, and Public Choice" at today's Austrian Scholar's Conference. He introduced the work as a response to the Public Choice anarchist literature of the 60s and 70s which all seemed to share Buchanan's pessimistic outlook for the potential for anarchy, the critical pieces of which are reprinted in the publication.

Also included in the work is Buchanan's response upon reading the initial manuscript. Stringham’s presentation of Buchanan's response was in itself rather pessimistic. I think instead that Buchanan's brief comments in the text and at last week’s seminar are a resounding victory for the thesis of Stringham's volume and in particular Boettke's conception of Anarchism as a progressive research agenda.

In both his written and spoken remarks concerning the anarchist literature of the 60s and 70s, Buchanan contextualizes his pessimism as a response to the chaotic atmosphere of the academic institutions of the time. In seminar he recollected a department bombing during his brief stay at UCLA. It seemed hard to be optimistic in such conditions. But looking back now Buchanan, alludes to his stance of being pleasantly surprised, or as Fred noted above his backward looking optimism. Since Stringham's goal as he presented it was to meet this pessimism head on, Buchanan's response is a claim to victory for the young anarchists, that Buchanan has since updated such pessimism, and in turn takes up the Boettke/Stringham thesis of pushing forward the anarchist theoretical frontier to answer the problems that terrorism seems to inflict upon our modern economy. Though not nor I doubt ever a self-proclaimed anarchist, Buchanan claims the desperate need for a “hard-headed analysis of what terrorism might produce and how it might be fought by persons in a society that respects personal liberties.”

[Rafe]

Perhaps Buchanan's work needs to appear in condensed form, like Readers Digest did for Hayek's "Serfdom", or in condensed form with commentary as I am doing for some of Popper's books. "Conjectures and Refutations" which started in August last year and ran into October.
http://conjecturesandrefutations.net/weblog/?p=18

"The Open Society" volume 1 ran through October and November. http://conjecturesandrefutations.net/weblog/?p=105

Volume 2 started in February and is almost done.
http://conjecturesandrefutations.net/weblog/?p=171