Abstract
Contrary to the claims of some of his critics, James Buchanan was an ardent democrat. I argue that Buchanan’s conception of democratic governance organized by a contractually justified constitution is highly distinctive because of his commitment to a strong conception of individualism. For Buchanan, democracy is neither justified instrumentally—by the goods it generates—nor by reference to some antecedent conception of justice. Instead, democracy is the only political option for a society that takes individualism seriously. One implication of this view is that democracies can only be limited by the rules they collectively give themselves in the form of constitutions. I explicate this conception of democracy and address some of its implications, assumptions, and challenges.
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Notes
Throughout, following Southwood (2010), I use “contractualism” as a general catch-all term for any social contract theory.
A point that, as Holcombe notes (2018), puts Buchanan’s contractualism and his classical liberalism in potential tension. This feature of Buchanan’s thought should give more pause both to Buchanan’s followers as well as his critics.
In an intriguing footnote, Buchanan (1977, 117, n. 6) argues that even Rawls’s A Theory of Justice can be interpreted as an “essay in persuasion,” an “attempt to convince readers that they should agree on” Rawls’s principles. Buchanan goes on to argue that we should not see Rawls as proffering a normative argument for the direct implementation of those principles.
Frank Knight viewed these two things differently. “Persuasion”, for Knight, is the potentially coercive attempt to turn someone to your point of view, while “discussion” is an exchange of ideas unconstrained by strategy (Gordon 1974, 574). Notice the subtle path from Knights “democracy as discussion” where discussion is an exchange of ideas to Buchanan’s “politics of exchange”.
William Riker never precisely defines “populism,” but his references to Rousseau and the general will make it clear that the core ideas of populism for Riker are (1) a positive conception of freedom bound up with collective choice and (2) and the result of democratic procedure should be taken as the true and good decision of the people as a whole. The radical implication—that Buchanan does not share—is that the result of collective choice should stand in as a right reason for the individual choosers. Buchanan does not claim that the democratic process acts as the true voice of public reason or that this reason should silence the individual reason of citizens.
Contrast with William Riker in Liberalism Against Populism.
Individualism is “thin” is the sense that it neither assumes nor justifies much. It does, however, constrain options in important ways, which gives it its bite. Thanks to Chris Melenovsky for pushing me to clarify this point.
There is a discussion of the “natural distribution” in the Limits of Liberty that is related to Winston Bush’s (1972) earlier model, but both are about the distribution of resources between parties not about how those parties are defined. Whether, for instance, one party could be the property (wholly or partially) of another is a question antecedent to the kind of model that Bush develops and Buchanan alludes to. Hobbes pretty clearly leaves it open that individuals can claim other people as their property and so I do not think this fundamental question should be excluded from contract theory.
This points back to the Frank Knight quote I started with. Thanks to Chris Melenovsky for pushing me to make this point explicit.
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Thrasher, J. Democracy Unchained: Contractualism, Individualism, and Independence in Buchanan’s Democratic Theory. Homo Oecon 36, 25–40 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-019-00085-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-019-00085-6