I last saw Jim Buchanan three months ago, at a Liberty Fund
conference held to celebrate The Calculus of Consent,
which he had written with Gordon Tullock 50 years earlier. The
participants were mostly Jim’s former students, now getting on
themselves in years, all with distinguished careers in the field of
Public Choice which with Gordon he created. Everyone knew that, at
92 years of age, Jim would not be with us too much longer, and the
conference was as much an expression of friendship and love as it
was a discussion of ideas.
That wasn’t what Jim wanted, though. He was too feisty for that,
and went out of his way to tell us again and again that we hadn’t
really understood him. It was like the moment in Annie
Hall where the show-off in the cinema queue holds forth about
Marshall McCluhan until Marshall McCluhan steps out of the queue to
say, “You don’t really understand me at all!”
Jim’s first commitment was to truth, and that took him on an
intellectual and geographic odyssey. He taught first at the
University of Virginia, and it was there that he and Gordon
developed their ideas about Public Choice. The core idea here is
that people in government, bureaucrats and politicians, respond to
economic incentives and that these are less than perfectly aligned
with the interests of the governed. That wasn’t a novel idea. It
wouldn’t have surprised Max Weber 40 years earlier. What was novel
was the rigor of their theories, advanced by sophisticated
economists. What was even more startling was that Jim and Gordon
were writing during the high tide of 1960s liberalism, and their
ideas shocked their properly left-wing colleagues in
Charlottesville, who assumed that government always acted from the
most benign of motives. Jim and Gordon were undoubtedly smart
people, but was it possible they were actually right-wing!
Rebuffed at U. Va., the two moved to Blacksburg, where they
stayed until another quarrel with administrators brought them to
George Mason University, where they remained until their
retirement. Their years at Fairfax and Arlington were happy ones,
and the Center Jim founded at Mason nurtured some of the smartest
of the new generation of economists.
The Calculus of Consent created a special discipline in
itself: Constitutional Political Economy, which examines how
government fares under different constitutional arrangements. What
is little understood is the way in which Jim and Gordon developed
these ideas at the same time as and through discussions with
Harvard’s John Rawls. They ended up in different places, but the
starting point was the same: what kind of government would people
choose for themselves, as an abstract matter? For Rawls, the answer
was Obama-style socialism; for Jim and Gordon the answer was to be
found in the thoughts of the Framers, and Madison in particular.
Halfway through his project Jim read The Federalist Papers
and realized that the questions that interested him were the same
ones that Madison had discussed 170 years before.
The 1960s was a different time. Looking backwards, Jim described
how he could not at the time have predicted the success of Rawls’
theories and the way in which America has embraced government
planning and restrictions on personal liberty. That wasn’t the kind
of government to which people would consent, Jim told us, and he
championed the kind of restrictions on government, such as the
Balanced Budget Amendment, that would keep it off our backs.
Jim was an old-school gentleman, with a courtly and formal
style. He was the enemy of cant and a lover of truth, and is missed
as the kindest of teachers by hundreds of former students.
R.I.P.
