Consenting to collective action: the classical liberal constitutional calculus of James M. Buchanan.

AuthorHolcombe, Randall G.
PositionEssay

Tames M. Buchanan, a self-described classical liberal, had a research program extending more than half a century that was dedicated to analyzing--and justifying--collective action, including coercive action undertaken by governments. Buchanan's classical-liberal ideology rests firmly on a foundation of individualism, so it is interesting to analyze how his analysis moves from that individualistic foundation to a justification of collective action in which individuals are forced to comply with government edicts. The essence of Buchanan's framework is the idea that individuals can agree to be coerced and that the coercion they agree to furthers their own individual goals, including protecting them from having their rights violated by others. My analysis of Buchanan's constitutional calculus first looks at his individualistic foundation, then discusses the constitutional problem that Buchanan envisions, and, finally, analyzes critically some aspects of his constitutional calculus that may be at odds with his classical-liberal foundation.

Individualism

Buchanan stated in "The Soul of Classical Liberalism," "The encompassing vision that informs classical liberalism is described by an interaction of persons and groups within a rule-bound set of behavioral norms that allow each person or agent to achieve internally defined goals that are mutually achievable by all participants.... There is, and can be, no social or collective purpose to be expected from the process of interaction; only private purposes are realized, even under the idealized operation of the structure and even if collectivized institutions may be instruments toward such achievements" (2000, 115). This idea appears in one of Buchanan's earlier works where he stated, "The state has no ends other than those of its individual members and is not a separate decision-making unit. State decisions are, in the final analysis, the collective decisions of individuals" (1949, 498). Buchanan made it clear that within his classical- liberal viewpoint, the only purpose of government is to accomplish individuals' ends. There is no such thing as a "social or collective purpose." Herein lies an issue that warrants further analysis within Buchanan's constitutional framework, however. Collective action, taking this individualistic approach, is undertaken to accomplish "only private purposes," but under any nonunanimous-decision rule some people are in a position to use the force of government to accomplish their private purposes at the expense of others. Buchanan (1962) explicitly said so. Rent seeking is an obvious example of some people--the rent seekers--gaining rents for themselves at the expense of others.

Still, the idea of politics as exchange lies at the foundation of The Calculus of Consent when early on Buchanan and his coauthor Gordon Tullock stated, "Men co-operate through exchange of goods and services in organized markets, and such co-operation implies mutual gain.... At base, political or collective action under the individualistic view of the State is much the same. Two or more individuals find it mutually advantageous to join forces to accomplish certain common purposes" (1962, 19).

With respect again to Buchanan's conception of government, rent seeking is an example where people do not "achieve internally defined goals that arc mutually achievable by all participants" (2000, 115). Some gain at the expense of others. Buchanan was, of course, very familiar with the rent-seeking literature begun by Tullock (1967) and Anne Krueger (1974) and extended by many others. William Baumol (1990), for example, indicated how the coercive institutions of government can turn the activities that individuals pursue for their mutual gain into predatory activities where some individuals use the force of government to extract resources from others and in the process lower aggregate productivity. As Tullock (1975) and Mancur Olson (1982) noted, once these predatory institutions develop, they arc difficult to reverse. There is a substantial public-choice literature that develops models in which the force of government is used to benefit some at the expense of others rather than, as Buchanan presented it, to secure mutual gains through collective action.

Buchanan and Tullock addressed this issue, building on the individualistic approach that is consistent with all of Buchanan's work.

It seems futile to talk seriously of a "theory" of constitutions in a society other than that which is composed of free individuals--at least free in the sense that deliberate exploitation is absent. This point will require further elaboration as we proceed, because ... our analysis of decision procedures reveals that certain rules will allow certain members of the group to use the structure to obtain differential advantage. However, it is precisely the recognition that the State may be used for such purposes which should prompt rational individuals to place constitutional restrictions on the use of the political process. (1962, 13) The purpose of constitutional rules is to address--but not necessarily to prevent--rent seeking and, more generally, government actions that benefit special interests at the expense of the general public.

Perhaps the best-known chapter of Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962) is chapter 6, where they demonstrated that a group might unanimously agree to a less than unanimous decision rule for some types of decisions. People will recognize that group decisions will sometimes go against their interests, but at the same time they believe that over a large number of decisions the benefits of the less-inclusive decision rule will exceed the costs. Assuming that rents are generated within a collective decision-making process that has been approved unanimously, Buchanan and Tullock suggested that any losses to rent seeking are a cost that is outweighed by the benefit generated by the collective activity the less than unanimous decision rule facilitates.

Two major assumptions underlie this conclusion. The first is that the collective decision-making process has been agreed to unanimously, and the second is that the actual outcomes generated by that process were within the bounds of the expectations of those who agreed to it. In other words, the outcomes were not unanticipated and worse than what those agreeing expected when they tendered their agreement. Both of these assumptions are far from self-evident as descriptions of actual government action.

Buchanan was consistently inclined to look at political activity within the framework of collective agreement, as opposed to viewing that some use the force of government to coerce others. He stated that his constitutional political economy research program emphasizes "cooperative rather than conflictual" interaction among individuals (1990, 1). In one of his earlier published works, he commented, "The state has no ends other than those of its individual members and is not a separate decision-making unit. State decisions are, in the final analysis, the collective decisions of individuals" (1949, 498).

The Classical-Liberal Question: How to Preserve Liberty?

The classical-liberal problem that Buchanan saw is embodied in the title of his 1975 book The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. He painted a Hobbesian picture of anarchy, where life is a "war of all against all" as well as "nasty, brutish, and short." Then, referring to the individual who wants to preserve classical- liberal values, he said, "When he recognizes that there are limits to the other-regardingness of men, and that personal conflict would be ubiquitous in anarchy, the extreme individualist is forced to acknowledge the necessity of some enforcing agent, some institutionalized means of resolving interpersonal disputes" (1975, 6). Buchanan recognized that not everyone holds this Hobbesian view of anarchy, citing Murray Rothbard (1973), but he went on to criticize Rothbard for not coming to grips with the problem of defining an initial set of rights.

One can debate the Hobbesian vision of anarchy with the viability of Rothbard's vision, as I have done previously (Holcombe 2004), but Buchanan's vision of a society without government is Hobbesian, which gives rise to the necessity of government to preserve liberty. He continued to hold this position in his later work. Geoffrey Brennan and Buchanan referenced Hobbes to say that we benefit from a set of rules that govern people's interactions with each other because "without [these rules] we would surely fight. We would fight because the object of desire for one individual would be claimed by another. Rules define the...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT