Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism James M. Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus, George Mason University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, US Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA ©James M. Buchanan 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Glensanda House Montpellier Parade Cheltenham Glos GL50 1UA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 136 West Street Suite 202 Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Buchanan, James M. Why I, too am not a conservative : the normative vision of classical liberalism / James M. Buchanan. p. cm. 1. Liberalism. 2. Conservatism. I. Title. JC574.B83 2006 320.51—dc22 2005049719 ISBN 1 84542 314 3 Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall 3 0 Contents Preface vi Acknowledgments vii 1 Why I, too, am not a conservative 1 2 Classical liberalism and the perfectibility of man 11 3 Normative presuppositions for democracy 22 4 Beyond law: the institutionalized ethics of liberal order 30 5 The equivocal ethics of liberalism 40 6 The soul of classical liberalism 52 7 Classical liberalism as an organizing ideal 62 8 The sense of community in Hayekian moral order 72 9 The Hayek difference 86 10 God, the state and the market 92 11 Madison’s angels 95 12 The emergence of a classical liberal: a confessional exercise 98 Index 107 v Preface This book would never have come into being without the encouragement of my personal editor Jo Ann Burgess, who suggested that I put together a selected and internally coherent set of pieces, all of which have been written after the cutoff date of 1998 for the Liberty Fund Collected Worksproject (20 volumes, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund [1999–2001]). I have written the intro- ductory and concluding chapters specifically for this book, each of which is designed to place both the essays of this book, and my own position, in the somewhat broader perspective of political philosophy. Beyond initial encour- agement, however, Jo Ann Burgess has been uniquely helpful in all stages of editorial organization of this book. James M. Buchanan Fairfax, Virginia September 2004 vi Acknowledgments The publishers wish to thank the following, who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material. The Independent Institute for article ‘The soul of classical liberalism’in The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, 5 (1), 111–29. © Copyright 2000, The Independent Institute, 100 Swan Way, Oakland, California 94621-1428; www. independent.org; [email protected] Liberty Fund, Inc. and The Committee on Social Thought for VHS and audio- cassette ‘Morality and community in the extended market order’ in The Legacy of Friedrich Hayek, 7, 2000. Cato Institute for chapter ‘Madison’s angels’ in John Samples (ed.), James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2002, pp. 9–12. The Tampere Club for the chapter ‘Normative presuppositions for democracy’ in The Future of Democracy: Essays of the Tampere Club (2003), Keuruu, Finland:Kustannas Oy Aamulehti, pp. 49–59. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. vii 1. Why I, too, am not a conservative INTRODUCTION The title for this book, and for this introductory chapter, refers to one of F.A. Hayek’s most famous and familiar essays ‘Why I am not a conservative,’ which he appended to his treatise The Constitution of Liberty published in 1960. Hayek felt that it was necessary to stake a claim for identification as a classical liberal and, in so doing, to forestall the co-option of the term ‘liberal’ by those who would subvert the time-tested emphasis on individual liberty itself. For Hayek, for whom socialism remained his lifelong bête noir, conser- vative bedfellows were welcome enough, but he saw no reason to crawl under the terminological blanket. More specifically, my title is stimulated by Timothy Roth’s Equality, Rights, and the Autonomous Self(2004), to which he adds the subtitle Toward a Conservative Economics. Since, in a very broad sense, the position laid out by Roth, and earlier by Hayek, does not differ essentially from my own, I feel it obligatory to defend classical liberalism, as Hayek did more than four decades ago, as a term that aims to be descriptive of a coherent political philosophy that differs in its basic elements from that which is summarized under the rubric ‘conservatism.’Much more than ‘economics’or even ‘politi- cal economy’is involved here, and it is almost a category mistake to apply such a general term to a possible stance on the direction of public policy toward the openness of markets for a particular time and place. Conservatismand liberalismare two distinct ways of looking at and think- ing about the whole realm of human interaction, or, even more fundamentally, at the human beings who interact one with another. The several separately written essays in this book have the common purpose of articulating the liberal vision, interpreted in its classical understanding, which informed the very construction and evolution of our institutions of order in Western countries. This introductory chapter alone concentrates attention on the opposing vision, conservatism. In ‘Conservatism, liberalism and the status quo,’ I discuss the place of the status quo in the conservative position, including possible commonality with liberal attitudes in particular circumstances. In ‘The human species’and ‘The transcendence of value,’I shall discuss those elements in this vision that seem to contrast most dramatically with the liberal 1