I’ve never been that much of a fan of James Buchanan nor have I shared the enthusiasm for public-choice theory among those who I would otherwise be in sympathy with on matters of politics. An article published years ago in The Independent Review by Geoffrey Brennan and Michael) Munger, titled “The Soul of James Buchanan” (I can't get the link to The Independent Review piece to work, captures many of the areas where I further disagree with Buchanan.
Whereas Buchanan is a social-contract theorist who is optimistic about the ability of human reason to craft rules to solve the problems generated by social existence, I utterly reject social-contract theory, and believe that whatever rules humanity has are necessarily generated by history. We both may be skeptics, but we are at odds about what we are skeptical about. Whereas, Buchanan is skeptical about the ability of history to generate rules well suited to a liberal society, I’m a skeptic about reason’s ability to substantially improve upon the rules that history has bestowed to us.
I find it hard to get behind James Buchanan’s research program because I simply do not find any worth in social-contract theory. I think social-contract theory is incredibly dangerous to sound thought about the nature of society. No state is the product of a social contract, and social-contract theory can blind us to understanding what the real nature of each state is. Each state is the product of its history — which involve a myriad of experiences, from conquest to commerce to rules determining inheritance— and so our understanding of what each state is should take into consideration that they are the products of historical evolution rather than an agreement hashed out among its members.
Rather than guiding our understanding of each state as a creature embedded in its own particular history, social-contract theory tempts us to replace an understanding with what we think the state should be. Buchanan fully embraces that danger when he writes, with Gordon Tullock, in the introduction of The Calculus of Consent that “We are not directly interested in what the State or a State actually is, but propose to define quite specifically… what we think a State ought to be” (Liberty Fund: 1999, 3). However, if we do not understand what the nature of the state actually is, then how can we delude ourselves into thinking we can improve upon it?
As one would figure from the title The Calculus of Consent, consent plays a massive role in Buchanan’s research program. As Brennan and Munger write: “His notion of consent was surprisingly nearly literal. He really meant consent, unanimous consent, giving each person a veto over any alterations to the status quo“ (p. 5). Yet, if politics has a point — a final cause, so to speak — it isn’t to generate consensus, it’s to generate acquiescence.
People in politics aren’t trying to generate agreement so much as silence. A successful policy is one that people don’t protest. The successful states that we see around us aren’t the result of consent, but a result of people being willing to put up with what the state is doing. For instance, it would be absurd to say that contemporary Republicans have consented to the Affordable Care Act. They certainly haven’t; nevertheless, aren’t going up in arms about it, and have instead acquiesced to fighting it through politics. The rules of the game that dictate how Democrats and Republicans fight over the Affordable Care Act haven’t been decided in a social contract, but instead are part of the inherited institutions that all Americans live their lives surrounded by.
Republican voters may also have been very unhappy when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012; however, they are willing to acquiesce to his presidency, and to look forward, they hope, to having their own president in office in 2016. That acquiescence is what unsuccessful states lack. Egypt’s state failed in 2011 when its citizens were no longer willing to acquiesce to Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Consent just has no place in that picture, and so there’s no good reason to talk about it. Instead, we should be talking about acquiesence, and the reasons why people get along in society without actual consent, which they certainly manage to do, as American politics, however partisan it may be, gives witness to. Social-contract theory simply misses the train on that very important point.
Moreover, Buchanan rejected the very process of descent with modification that makes the evolution of rules in society possible. As Brennan and Munger write: “He believed that people ought to craft for themselves the rules of the socio-eco-politico game by which they were to interact” (p. 7). Without the inheritance of rules, there cannot be the evolution of rules. The evolution of any entity is the consequence of the different variations it has accumulated across generations. If any entity is to evolve, then it must descend with modification, and that descent must involve some form of heredity.
If rules are created by each generation anew for the designs of that generation, then they don’t evolve; rather, they are created anew each generation. Brennan and Munger write about how Buchanan rejected that traditions had any legitimacy: “He rejected completely the Burkean conservatism that required deference to tradition and symbols of merit that were static and inherited” (p. 7). Without a modicum of deference to inherited rules, then human society cannot function. Inherited rules provide the focal points by which societies cohere. To deny their legitimacy is to deny the very fabric of society.
The liberal society cannot be divorced from its history. Edmund Burke appreciated that fact in Reflections on the Revolution in France, yet Brennan and Munger position Burke as a conservative opposite of Buchanan's classical liberalism, even though many classical liberals, such as Lord Acton, were admirers of Burke. Though the two may want to divorce the virtue of hope from the virtue of faith in “The Soul of James Buchanan?”, they are surprisingly ignorant of the fact that the virtue of hope springs from the virtue of faith. The theological virtues are united. We can have hope because of our faith. Without faith, there is no foundation for hope. To go on hoping without a sound foundation of faith isn’t a virtue, but a vice.
The reason why we can have hope for a liberal civilization is that we have faith that the civilization’s rules, which have evolved in historical processes that cannot be flattened out to human craftsmanship, shall be able to curb the ambitions of tyrants, and to guide people in peaceful coexistence. David Hume got to the faith we should have in liberal institutions when he wrote in his essay, “That politics may be reduced to a science”: “Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration.”