The Soul of James Buchanan?

• Author: Brennan, Geoffrey
• Position: Critical essay

We learned many things from Jim Buchanan. Among the more important is that titles should be felicitous. Ours here is ambitious, perhaps presumptuous, even slightly mischievous (as we shall shortly explain). Our point of departure is Buchanan's paper published in this journal thirteen years ago. In that sense, the leap from "The Soul of Classical Liberalism" (Buchanan 2000b) to the soul of one of classical liberalism's chief expositors and defenders strikes us as natural--and may even meet the felicity test!

First, to the mischief. The truth is that, for Buchanan, a reference to "souls" is decidedly out of character. The term connotes religion, and he was antagonistic toward religion of all kinds. His opposition was not just to "organized" religion: he was (if possible) even less sympathetic to unorganized populist mystics and new-age spiritualists.

He shared this attitude with his Chicago mentor Frank Knight--and we suspect that this may have been one of the sources of their common feeling. (1) Buchanan was a resolute atheist and a resolute realist about politics: in one of his especially felicitous paper titles, he defined public-choice theory as "Politics Without Romance" ([1979] 1999). More generally, he hewed to a principled modesty about normative commitments of all kinds. If Jim thought classical liberalism had a "soul," he would have denied that he (or anyone else) had one, at least in any remotely religious sense. (2)

Brennan offers this brief anecdote as a hint of Buchanan's animus toward religion:

It was Ash Wednesday--probably 1978 or 1979. I had, in the manner of "Episcopalians in good standing," taken myself to church that morning before work and had been duly signed on the forehead with ashes as a symbol of my mortality: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return!" Although one is technically not supposed to do this, under normal circumstances I would have washed off the ashes before proceeding to work. But on this occasion I went directly to the office from church. Though I intended to visit the bathroom to clean up immediately on my arrival, by the time I got to work I had become preoccupied with other things and simply forgot. So it was that when Jim sauntered into my office at around eleven, he immediately pointed at me, and the following conversation ensued: Buchanan: "What's that on your face?" Brennan (somewhat absentmindedly): "Oh, that must be my ashes. It's Ash Wednesday, and we get marked with the cross from the ashes of last year's palms from Palm Sunday." Buchanan (instantly furious): "That's god d**ned gross! That's the grossest thing I've ever seen. You going around displaying your religion like that! I might as well go round indulging in indecent exposure!" (3) The situation deteriorated from there. Jim accused all Episcopalians (including presumably me) of being hypocrites. He announced (in stentorian tones) that the only religious people he had any time for were the Mormons because they at least gave up tea and coffee! I got furious myself. I told Jim that he didn't know what he was talking about--that he was just tone-deaf to anything of the spirit and that he ought to shut up about things he didn't understand. It was not a pretty scene. He stormed out of my office. And I remained, storming, within it! Then at about four in the afternoon, he shuffled back into my office again in a slightly shame-faced way and half-apologized, awkwardly confessing that maybe he'd been "a bit out of line." And I (having long since cooled down) responded that he had been quite right to be offended and that I more or less shared his views about extravagant displays of religion (which indeed I do). An uneasy truce was thereby called. But we learned not to talk of religion to each other. It was one of the things that separated us. Something that meant a great deal to me was plainly anathema to him. This strategy of avoidance didn't much affect our professional relationship--but it did inevitably color the personal. On professional issues, both of substance and of intellectual style, Jim and I were quite close. But there was always a distance between us on more personal matters that could never be bridged, despite some natural affection on both sides. (4) The takeaway from this account is clear. For Buchanan to adopt for his Independent Review paper a title with such a clear religious connotation is decidedly odd. To be fair, he does his best in the paper to define "soul" in terms that excise religion. So "soul" is to be understood as an "animating or vital principle" or a "moving spirit." And Buchanan certainly did have a soul in that sense! No one could accuse him of lacking animation or vitality or, for that matter, principle.

Our aim in what follows is to say something about what we see as the central features of that "animating spirit" and "vital principle." In doing so, we largely take as given Buchanan's substantive intellectual contribution. Many of the elements in that contribution do derive from what we take to be the "soul" of the man--what other authors here will describe as the Buchanan intellectual scheme (as we ourselves have done in other places). Rather than the intellectual scheme itself, our focus on this occasion is the underlying "animating spirit" and how it connects (and sometimes doesn't seem to connect) to the intellectual scheme.

Origins of a Soul?

We are not of the school of thought that regards an intellectual's work as reducible to his personal history. But some connections in the Buchanan case are worth noting.

The Buchanan family had a political past: Buchanan's grandfather had briefly been governor of Tennessee in the early 1890s as a member of the populist People's Party. This party was a coalition of agrarian interests--mainly poor cotton and wheat farmers from the South and the West. It stood for protection of farmer interests and was notable for its hostility to banks and railroads--and to elites generally. It promoted the policy of railroad nationalization but was generally suspicious of government. This was the political milieu that permeated the Buchanan household, and residues of it remained in Buchanan's attitudes--even though the academic influence in his upbringing lay mainly with his schoolteacher mother.

Jim did his undergraduate degree at Middle Tennessee Teachers College and proceeded to a master's degree at the University of Tennessee. During the war, he served on Admiral Nimitz's staff in the Pacific, and one episode during that period is worth retelling because it reinforces his populist instincts.

When the officer-training intake was first established, it was divided into companies alphabetically by last name. In each company, one of its number was appointed to "lead" that company. In each case, the person chosen had a degree from one of the Ivy League schools; but in the A-B platoon, no such person was available. So someone who fitted this requirement was assigned to that platoon as an "honorary A-B" (in fact, it was someone named "Rockefeller," who turned out to be one of the Rockefellers). To Jim, such...