Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism.

• Author: Niskanen, William
• Position: Book review

Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism James M. Buchanan Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005, 106 pp.

The main title of this book, of course, expresses James Buchanan's personal agreement with the famous 1960 essay by F. A. Hayek on "Why I Am Not a Conservative." Most of this small book, however, is better described by the subtitle. For this book is the only summary of Buchanan's important contribution to the philosophy of ethics.

Only the first and last of the 12 chapters were written specifically for this book, primarily to summarize the development of Buchanan's personal perspective on the book's two titles. The other 10 chapters are revisions of lectures that Buchanan has presented over the past decade. This small, dense book merits careful reading and reflection, chapter by chapter rather than at one sitting.

Buchanan, like Hayek, has long tried to distinguish his views as a classical liberal from those of a conservative--views that are often confused because classical liberals and conservatives have often been tactical allies. He differentiates these views primarily on the following four dimensions:

1. Classical liberals are open to consensual change; conservatives more generally support the stability of the social order.

2. Classical liberals assume a natural equality of humans; conservatives assume a natural hierarchy.

3. Classical liberals assume that individual responsibility is a necessary corollary of individual freedom; conservatives are more inclined to paternalism.

4. For classical liberals, value is subjective; conservatives are more likely to assume that there is an objective order of values.

For this reviewer, Buchanan's classical liberal seems more like an ideal type and his conservative more like someone we might meet in the real world.

Most of the remainder of this book makes the case for realistic utopias based on the ethic of reciprocity. Buchanan starts by rejecting the possibility of "a viable socio-economic-political-legal order in which the legal incentives are such that persons behave as Kantians quite independent of whether or not they feel ethically constrained" (p. 15).

Like Adam Smith, Buchanan emphasizes the importance of attitudes and rules of conduct in addition to the law--individual responsibility, manners, and a mutual commitment to the ethic of reciprocity. In that sense, the institutions of a liberal society are dependent on conservative individual values. And he...