Fearing freedom: the intellectual and spiritual challenge to liberalism.

• Author: Boettke, Peter
• Position: Critical essay

The vision of the eighteenth-century philosophers which enabled them to describe a social order that did not require the centralized direction of man over man may yet stir excitement. Free relations among free men--this precept of ordered anarchy can emerge as principle when successfully renegotiated social contract puts "mine and thine" in a newly defined structural arrangement and when the Leviathan that threatens is placed within new limits.

--James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty

In "The Soul of Classical Liberalism" (2000b), James Buchanan argued that modern advocates of the liberal order must move beyond the mid-twentieth- century project of "saving the books" and "saving the ideas" and instead embrace the challenge of "saving the soul" of liberalism. His argument is fairly straightforward: the vast majority of modern defenders of classical liberalism are scientific economists, and they base their defense on the logic and evidence that they work with. But these insights understandably do not translate easily into the popular imagination. The prospects for establishing a genuine liberal order, however, turn on capturing the intellectual imagination of a significant segment of the population. I am in complete agreement with Buchanan, and I myself had a "mindquake" similar to the one he experienced when as a student he was introduced to the vision of the spontaneous ordering of the free-enterprise market economy. Once that vision was in my head, it is in retrospect hard to imagine any other path that I could have pursued professionally. However, like Buchanan, I do also wonder why so few of my classmates who listened to the same lectures and read the same books had the same reaction to the material.

The expectation, Buchanan told his reader, that the teacher of economics could effectively communicate the principles of economics to the broad class of the intelligentsia as well as to the masses was grounded in hubris and folly. Instead of limiting our articulations to the teachings of a science and stressing policies that should be supported due to our enlightened self-interest, he argued, we need to provide a coherent "vision" of a social system that is simultaneously romantically, aesthetically, and morally pleasing. The liberal promise of individual autonomy, generalized economic prosperity, and domestic and international peace, of course, can provide (and has provided) such a coherent vision. As Deirdre McCloskey (2006, 2010) has recently stressed, where bourgeois virtues are respected and bourgeois activities are attributed dignity in the popular imagination, modern economic growth is made possible. Where the popular imagination rejects such virtues and despises such activities, poverty, ignorance, and squalor follow for the masses. Yet we must still be struck by the reality that very few folk songs are written as odes to commerce and capitalism, and many are written to celebrate class struggle and socialism.

Liberalism, at least economic liberalism, has an image problem. And Buchanan wanted those who value liberalism to address this problem head-on rather than continuing to deny its existence. In order to embrace the challenge, we must first fully understand it. To do that, I examine here the themes Buchanan raised in three essays that focus our attention on the critical issues. They are, in chronological order, "The Potential and Limits of Socially Organized Humankind" ([1988] 1991); "The Soul of Classical Liberalism" (2000b); and "Afraid to Be Free" (2005). The underlying economic analysis in all three essays is Buchanan's fundamental point that the same players acting under different rules will produce different games. The explanatory focus is on the rules of the game and their enforcement rather than on behavioral assumptions of the actors under examination per se. But it should be remembered at all times in the discussion that a Buchanan-inspired political economy treats the actors as analytically egalitarian, insists on behavioral symmetry across the different realms, and denies to the human actors under investigation in the context of market, legal, political, and social processes any notion of omniscience, benevolence, and omnipotence. These points are "given" in Buchanan's approach to political economy and social philosophy.

In these three essays, however, Buchanan pushed the analysis in novel directions. In "The Potential and Limits of Socially Organized Humankind," he raised the issue of justice; in "The Soul of Classical Liberalism," the issue of vision; and in "Afraid to Be Free," the issues of liberty and responsibility. I discuss each of these critical issues and then offer a suggested reconstruction of Buchanan's political economy and social philosophy that can embrace the challenges and provide a coherent vision of a society of free and responsible individuals. In such a society, people have the opportunity to participate in the ongoing conversation of democratic deliberation that constitutes collective action in their society, prosper in a market economy based on profit and loss, and live in and be actively engaged with caring communities. A free society, I argue, is a good society, and a self-governing citizenry must be willing to embrace the "cares of thinking" and "troubles of living," as Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835- 40] 2003) stressed so many years ago. But an appropriately structured political economy of a free society--one that exhibits neither dominion nor discrimination in human relationships--will not be one that individuals should fear, but one that will constitute an inspiring vision that can capture the population's imagination.

Was Justice a Missing Component in Classical Liberalism?

"The great scientific discovery of the eighteenth century," Buchanan argued, "out of which political economy (economics) emerged as an independent academic discipline, embodies the recognition that the complementary values of liberty, prosperity, and peace can be attained" ([1988] 1991, 244). As long as the state provides the appropriate laws and institutions--the rules of the game and their enforcement--individuals can be left alone to pursue their own projects while realizing the values of liberty, prosperity, and peace through mutually beneficial exchange with one another.

The classical-liberal ideal was never fully realized because although the intellectual vision captured the essential role of the state in providing the required infrastructure, there was a lack of attention to the distinction between the political structure and political intervention into the socioeconomic game. As a result, the structural constraints required to limit the negative consequences of politicized interventions were not established. Within a few generations, the classical- liberal ideal failed to inspire.

Buchanan postulated that critical to the failure to continually inspire was that the classical-liberal list of liberty, prosperity, and peace was incomplete because it omitted justice. The injustice of capitalist distribution inspired instead the socialist vision. The idea of justice, in both its Aristotelian senses of commutative justice and distributive justice, captures the intellectual imagination. The classical-liberal vision is one consistent with commutative justice (equity in the process), but its relationship to distributive justice (equity in outcomes) has always been dubious at best. Note how the failure to distinguish between the structure of rules and the politicized interventions into the game results in the blurring of the distinction between commutative and distributive justice in practice. If the political infrastructure permits differential treatment in the political process, such as special-interest-group politics and rent-seeking behavior, then the fairness of the structure itself is vulnerable to challenge, and a demand for a more equitable distribution of resources gained in that flawed process seems natural.

The incompleteness of the classical-liberal infrastructure permitted an alignment between those with a justice-driven moral purpose and the interest-motivated constituencies, and it resulted in discriminatory politics that erodes the rule of law. In The Limits of Liberty ([1975] 2000a), Buchanan argued that the public capital embodied in the protective and productive functions of government can be eroded through the redistributive politics of the "churning state" (see also de Jasay [1985] 1998). The constitutional puzzle from this perspective is one of empowering the protective and productive state without unleashing the redistributive state. But this puzzle cannot be solved as long as the question of justice is not met head on, and, instead, those having an interest-driven motivation can align with those having a moral-driven motivation to challenge the legitimacy of the economic and social order.

Effectively countering the distributive-justice critique of the market order requires both a reinvigorated defense of the constitutional order of limited government and an appropriate understanding of the operation of the market economy itself. Distributive justice within the context of the ongoing market process cannot be viewed as a question of "just division" but instead must be understood as emergent from the pattern of exchange, production, and resource use. There is no "fixed pie" to be divided up among the participants; the process of producing the pie--the exchange relations among participants and the resource use based on buying decisions within the process--determines how big the pie grows. The size of the economic pie, in other words, is not invariant to the way "we" choose to divide up the pie. Policymakers could, if they so desired, decide that they will confiscate the existing stock of oil reserves, and it would not impact the current supply of oil. But it would have a drastic impact on the future exploration and discovery of oil reserves.

Economic theory...