Abstract
In her 2017 book Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean identifies John C. Calhoun as the “lodestar” of public choice theory and argues that the conservative Southern Agrarian poets (Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others) were influential in the formation of 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan’s worldview. We test this argument with reference to the scholars cited in Buchanan’s collected works and elsewhere. The evidence for any direct or even indirect influence of Calhoun and the Agrarians is very scant, and we conclude that Buchanan’s intellectual program was shaped far more by Knut Wicksell, Frank Knight, and the Italian public finance tradition than by Calhoun or early twentieth-century segregationists.
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- 1.
Each of these provide representative contribution, with Beckert, Baptist, and Johnson’s books constituting a “Big Three” of sorts.
- 2.
- 3.
See Magness (2020) for further discussion of anti-discrimination in the public choice tradition.
- 4.
We counted a total of 13 tangential references to Calhoun between these two journals from their respective founding to January 2018. For comparison, the word “Calhoun” was almost as likely to appear in connection to a geographic place name.
- 5.
For more information on this see Richard Weaver’s essay “The Tennessee Agrarians,” especially pages 8–10. The essay appears as the first chapter in Curtis and Thompson (1987).
- 6.
More information can be found in the reprinted volume 16 of the Collected Works.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to scholars and commentators inside and outside our professional circles who have been sources of stimulating conversation and insights about Buchanan’s intellectual context. These include but are not limited to Jonathan Adler, David Bernstein, Steven G. Horwitz, Edward J. Lopez, Michael C. Munger, and Daniel J. Smith. In addition to John Murray, we also take this opportunity to mourn the passing of Steven G. Horwitz. All three authors are or have been affiliated with organizations that receive funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.
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Appendix: Carden on Murray
Appendix: Carden on Murray
John Murray and I were colleagues at Rhodes College in 2011–2012. He was an inspiring scholar and a dedicated teacher who took economics and history very seriously. He was also an excellent colleague who was unafraid to wrestle with the biggest of the big questions both on and off the clock. I gave a presentation on the subject of this paper (and a companion paper (Magness et al. 2019) at Rhodes College a week before John Murray passed away; it was, to the best of my knowledge, the last “academic” event John attended. It is fitting that this paper found a home in a volume dedicated to his memory. We understand the world better because of his scholarship, but more importantly, those of us who knew him are better people because of it.
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Carden, A., Geloso, V., Magness, P.W. (2022). Situating Southern Influences in James M. Buchanan and Modern Public Choice Economics. In: Gray, P., Hall, J., Wallis Herndon, R., Silvestre, J. (eds) Standard of Living. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06477-7_21
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