The Political Economist of His and Our Age: James M. Buchanan

 

It is hard to imagine a more fitting person to write a tribute to James Buchanan than his longtime associate and coauthor Geoffrey Brennan. Few understand Buchanan’s subtle positions with respect to philosophy, politics, and economics as well as Brennan. And Brennan’s tribute also captures the critical attitude that Buchanan believed we must always take. From his teacher Frank Knight, Buchanan learned many things, but perhaps the most important one was to treat all ideas critically and to hold nothing as sacrosanct. The onward-and-upward call that characterizes Buchanan’s intellectual career is what we must also adopt as our own if we want to make progress in the field of political economy.

After years of studying Buchanan’s writings and assigning them to students, I have lots of questions, some of which overlap with Brennan’s questions. I also have lots of appreciation, but no doubt Brennan is right that the best way to honor the legacy of Buchanan is to push the boundaries, leave the comfort zone, and probe deeper into the research program of constitutional political economy and the relationship between social philosophy and political economy more generally.

Two big questions that remain for me about Buchanan’s system, which Brennan raises, relate to (a) endogenous preferences and (b) evolutionary explanations for the rules on which we agree. First, lets examine endogenous preferences. Brennan in joint work with Philip Pettit (e.g., Brennan and Pettit 2002) has raised this issue to a new level in Public Choice/political economy discourse. Yes, they argue, power may corrupt, but political office and the responsibility of leadership may ennoble the office holder. Julian LeGrande’s Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens (2003) raised this endogenous preference critique of Public Choice theory as well. Buchanan himself seems to recognize this point in his essay “Natural and Artifactual Man” (1979a), where he makes a strong argument for the autonomy of the individual as a prerequisite for discovering the path to constructing his or her life. “Man wants liberty,” Buchanan states, “to become the man he wants to become.” Such an open-ended model of man raises a different set of questions from those that arise when Buchanan models man in the more closed-ended maximizing framework.

Anyone who follows Public Choice and Buchanan’s contributions to the field in particular will recognize immediately that he considers methodological individualism, homo-economicus, and politics-as-exchange as the three pillars on which the economic analysis of politics rests. But what actual purpose does homo-economicus play in Buchanan’s work when in essays like “What Should Economists Do?” (1979b) he seemingly rejects the maximizing model and the allocation paradigm? First, a careful reading demonstrates that Buchanan does not reject maximizing at the level of the individual. It is the intellectual sliding from the individual to the collective that he objects to. Individuals are teleological; economic systems are not. So treating the economic problem that society faces as the allocation of scarce means among competing ends is simply a nonstarter for Buchanan. This methodological restriction against carelessly sliding from the individual to the collective is also what underlies his critique of organismic views of the state (see Buchanan “A Pure Theory of Public Finance” 1949) as well as his critique of Arrow’s “Impossibility Theorem” (see Buchanan “Social Choice, Democracy and Free Markets” 1954).

It is perfectly legitimate in Buchanan’s system to see the individual as engaged in a self-interested rational choice; it is quite another to see society behaving collectively along these lines. It is also the case that Buchanan’s model of man is not one of narrow self-interest; a variety of arguments can enter the utility function. As Brennan points out in his remarks, Buchanan actually waffles back and forth between a position of pure logic, or philosophical understanding of human choosing, and the scientific/predictive theory. If men act like rats, Buchanan argues, then we can model them as maximizers; if men act like human choosers, engage in a quest to discover whom they want to become, then the maximizing model of man is not as useful a descriptor. So what use can it be put towards?

Here--and Geoff Brennan knows this better than anyone--Buchanan shifts the homo-economicus assumption from either an “as if” to explain economic behavior or a “normative benchmark” for decision theory to a tool in constitutional construction. This is the Humean move: In designing a government we must presume that all men are knaves and then build political institutions that guard against the knavishness in all of us. This is how a robust political and economic system can be cultivated--by rules that do not require us to become better people for their operation, but which work even when we are sometimes good, more often bad; sometimes smart, but more often stupid. The rules, not the behavioral assumptions, do the heavy analytical lifting in political economy.

Buchanan, like Hamilton in Federalist 1, wants us to address the challenge of whether our constitutions are going to be consequence of accident and force (historical evolution) or choice and reflection (constitutional craftsmanship). While not denying the power of historical evolution, Buchanan denies its “efficiency” in selecting the right rules by which we can live better together. Instead, he opts for choice and reflection, and that hope is to be found in constitutional contractarianism (to use Brennan apt phraseology). Buchanan’s use of a rational-actor logic--in a situation where the actor himself has no idea of his particular endowments of talents and position in the postconstitutional contract world--will produce agreement on fair rules. This constitutional agreement will be harder to broker the more concrete the rules of resource distribution under discussion, but easier to broker the more abstract and general the rules for the social game we are to play.

Since 2008 Buchanan sharpened his criticism of the over-optimism about the efficient evolution of rules governing the economic and political game of modern society. The New Chicago School, he argued repeatedly, had been led into an error by stressing the machine-like efficiency of the market economy without emphasizing that the market functions or fails to function on the basis of the rules within which it operates. And Buchanan held out particular criticism for a naïve form of libertarianism, which thinks that the market itself can produce its own rules through evolutionary selection. He attributes this position to Hayek and his followers. Buchanan makes some fundamental points about not only the reason of rules, but the necessity of rules and their enforcement.

I have argued repeatedly throughout my own career--which has been defined by the postcommunist transitions and the failure of development planning (see Boettke 1990; 1993; 2001)--that one of the really significant practical challenges in political economy is contemplating whether the “transition to the market is too important to be left to the market?” [1] I don’t want to emphasize the normative element of this but rather the positive political economy of this question. In many ways this is just an implications of taking Buchanan’s own admonition that we begin with the “here and now” in political economy analysis. When discussing transition economies, and failed and weak states, as Raghuram Rajan (2004) does, it is a mistake in economic analysis to treat the institutional framework as given when in fact the absence of that institutional framework explains why the situation is what it is.

While fully conceding Buchanan’s point about the misuse of evolutionary arguments, I have to respectfully disagree with my teacher. [2] I don’t think the mere move to social contract theory and veils of uncertainty at the rules stage solves the difficulties that Buchanan identifies. However sympathetic I am to Buchanan’s efforts, I think the more fruitful research approach is to take the challenge seriously and seek to identify the mechanisms operative in social evolutionary processes that serve a functional role analogous to property, prices and profit/loss within the market economy and which provide us with functional rules on which we can agree.

We must see constitutions as capable of being made from the “bottom up” rather than as always the consequences of “top-down” choice, precisely because in the situations of transition and development that we study, the institutional capacity to achieve order from the “top down” is absent almost by definition. It is important to stress that such constitution-making from the bottom up, along the lines discussed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom in their respective work, does not commit the analysis to viewing constitutions as merely the product of historical accident and force, but instead as genuine products of reflection and choice. The rules that make possible self-governance and the overcoming of social dilemmas can be, but are not necessarily, limited to evolved informal social norms. Covenants without the sword of the state can take many forms--and we need to be open as economists and political economists to studying the details of the variety of design principles that enable effective self-governance. [3]

The open-ended model of choice, I would like to contend, fits with the bottom-up approach to constitutional craftsmanship. [4] The rules that enable us to turn situations of social conflict into opportunities for realizing the gains from social cooperation under the division of labor are those rules that Buchanan identifies in his reflection on constitutional construction. They are general; they minimize predation (including public predation and thus political externalities); and they introduce a structure of countervailing forces that check opportunistic behavior by pitting it against other opportunists rather than relying on saintly conversions among political actors.

James Buchanan is the political economist of his and our age. He thought deeply about issues in social philosophy and political economy that, among his contemporaries, perhaps only Amartya Sen also took on. He was a political economist in the Smithian sense of a moral philosopher in the age of economic scientism. In this sense he was very much following in the footsteps of his teacher Knight and also Hayek. Others were strong classical liberals, such as Milton Friedman, and still others were more hardnosed Public Choice economists, such as Gordon Tullock. But Buchanan waged a different intellectual battle--one for the soul of a discipline and an idea. The practice of economics had been derailed by excessive aggregation on the one hand and excessive formalism on the other by mid-20th century. Buchanan had to pick up his pen and try to counter these. The result is an amazing intellectual legacy for scholars to draw on in the fields of philosophy, politics, and economics. Endnotes 

[1] Peter Leeson and I published a paper under that title (Boettke and Leeson 2003), and we also examine similar issues in our work on two-tiered entrepreneurship (Leeson and Boettke 2009), also see my overview papers on the topic (see Boettke 2011).

[2] For an appreciation of the central insights of Buchanan to the intellectual tradition of “mainline” economics, see my discussion of his work in Living Economics (Boettke 2012, 42-65; 241-61).

[3] On the Ostroms’ contributions to political economy of self-governance see Boettke (2012, 139-158; 159-171). Also see Aligica and Boettke (2010) for a book length discussion of the research program of the Bloomington School of Political Economy.

[4] On the open-ended model of choice and its implications for political economy see Richard Wagner’s Mind, Society, and Human Action (2010).