James M. Buchanan’s constitutional project: past and future

Buchanan’s first academic publication (Buchanan 1949) appeared nearly seven decades before the last one I was able to locate (Buchanan and Yoon 2015), which was published 2 years after his death.

Reasons for the likely breakdown of orderly anarchy are given by Nozick (1974) and Holcombe (2004). Regardless of whether one agrees, Buchanan starts with the view that liberty will be compromised without a government to protect it.

Acemoglu and Robinson (2019) focus on the same issue Buchanan does, referring to that space between anarchy and Leviathan as a narrow corridor in which liberty is preserved, and offer many examples of cases in which nations managed to find that corridor, along with examples of nations in the corridor that fell out of it. While the narrow corridor Acemoglu and Robinson refer to is what Buchanan call the limits of liberty, they make no reference to Buchanan’s work.

Buchanan claims to have discovered Wicksell’s work on taxation after completing his dissertation, a claim I have heard him make in presentations several times. Buchanan (1992, p. 5) says, “Having finished my work, including the German language examination, I had the leisure of a scholar without assignments in the Harper Library stacks during 3 months of the summer of 1948. By sheer chance, I pulled Knut Wicksell’s 1896 dissertation on taxation from the shelves, a book that was untranslated and unknown. [A footnote appears here to Wicksell (1896)]. Wicksell laid out before me a set of ideas that seemed to correspond precisely with those that I had already in my head, ideas that I could not have expressed and would not have dared express in the public-finance mindset of the time.” Yet that exact treatise is listed as a reference in Buchanan (1948), his doctoral dissertation. So, he is claiming in Buchanan (1992) to have discovered Wicksell’s work after completing his dissertation, even though he referenced Wicksell (1896) in his dissertation.

Note that to ensure that collective decisions are in the interest of all individuals, unanimous agreement must be required as a decision rule. Holcombe (1986) notes that if a less-than-unanimous decision rule is in effect, everyone might agree because it often is costly to be in the minority, rather than that the decision furthers everyone’s interest. With simple majority rule, for example, one’s vote rarely will determine the outcome of a vote, but always will determine whether the voter is in the majority or in the minority. So, everyone might agree to a decision that makes some of those agreeing worse off.

Rothbard (1973) and Friedman (2014) question whether government really does make people better off, and whether government is necessary for the creation of an orderly society. Pinker (2011) provides a good argument—and lots of evidence—that a strong state is necessary to create an orderly society. The point here is not to take sides, but to note that Buchanan and Tullock lay out the argument, which is supported by Pinker (2011) and which Buchanan (1975) discusses further and defends.

Gordon does say that Nozick’s theory really is a theory of contracts, whereas Buchanan and Rawls have a theory of contract. As argued below, this may give Nozick’s theory a more solid public choice foundation.

Such renegotiation from anarchy is similar to Rawls’s (1971) designing of a social contract from behind a veil of ignorance, but also different in some significant ways, which Holcombe (2015) discusses, but the differences are of minor importance here.

Buchanan and Devletoglu (1970) criticize the student protests of the late 1960s, but it is easy to depict those protests as a demand for renegotiating the social contract. Social justice, racial equality, and the end to the military draft were major issues. While Buchanan’s constitutional project rests heavily on rejecting the constitutional contract if it falls outside the bounds of an expected renegotiation, Buchanan did not see a real-world parallel when stent protesters were demanding just such a renegotiation.

North et al. (2008) make the distinction between personal characteristics and socially ascribed characteristics. In anarchy, people have personal characteristics but no socially ascribed characteristics.

Buchanan (1975, p. 175) does take issue with the conclusion Rawls draws, but for different reasons.

Buchanan’s first book, an introductory economics textbook, notes the importance of constitutional constraints on government. Allen et al. (1954, p. 373) say, “Democracy in the sense of participation in the governing process by the whole body politic can function effectively only if the area of governmental decision is severely restricted.” Brennan and Buchanan (1980) might be viewed as a development of that idea.