Onwards and Upwards: James Buchanan at 80

Onwards and Upwards: James Buchanan at 80Author(s): Geoffrey BrennanSource: Public Choice, Vol. 104, No. 1/2 (Jul., 2000), pp. 1-18Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026460 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.189 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:13:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer

http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026460?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Public Choice 104: 1-18, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

1

Onwards and upwards: James Buchanan at 80

GEOFFREY BRENNAN Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia

Accepted 14 January 2000

[This paper is an edited version of an address delivered on the occasion of James Buchanan's eightieth birthday celebrations, held on October third, 1999 in Falls Church, Virginia. It very much bears the marks of its status as an "occasional" piece. It is reproduced here because the editors felt that it would be of interest to a wider audience than the two hundred or so attendees at the celebratory dinner and not least to the readership of Public Choice.]

[I am grateful to Jonathan Pincus for comments on an earlier version.]

1. Titles

Anyone who has ever collaborated with Jim Buchanan will have learned that titles are important. One can spend several hours with Jim brainstorming to get something that is both descriptive and appropriately euphonious - and if nothing suitable emerges, you can be prepared to revisit the whole issue for days, even weeks sometimes, until the right note is struck. The results of this kind of effort can be seen in such nicely judged constructions as "The Calculus of Consent", or "The Limits of Liberty", or "Democracy in Deficit", or "Politics without Romance". I remember as an undergraduate student in far-off Australia finding on my reading list a piece entitled "Politics, Policy and the Pigovian Margins" and wondering long and hard at that title. What strange and wonderful imaginings those "Pigovian margins" conjured in the young Geoffrey's uninitiated mind. Not everyone, I guess, could strike poetry out of public economics - but Jim often managed this feat. And not least in his titles. Accordingly, on this occasion I have given some thought to the title of my remarks, and I want to spend a little space defending my choice.

First of all, as is probably widely known, "onwards and upwards" is one of Buchanan's standard ways of signing off letters. In that sense, it is a kind of Buchanan "signature", as we might put it. More than "cheers" or "best wishes" or any of the other standard exits, "onwards and upwards" has always struck me as both more communicative and more engaging. It speaks of



2

pressing on, with confidence and a sense of purpose and destination. Indeed, I have been so impressed with the phrase that I have presumed to adopt it myself - just another of the many things that I have taken up from the Buchanan repertoire. And I notice that I am not unique in this - that several others of the extended Buchanan intellectual family use the expression as well. To my knowledge, none of these others refers to "life in the putty- knife factory" - an expression that is, in my experience, unique to Jim; nor, at a more intellectual level, to that distinctively Buchananesque [and, to my taste, infinitely obscure] expression, "the relatively absolute absolute". I was actually tempted to title this piece, "Life in the Putty-Knife Factory" and indeed may well save that title for another occasion; but I can assure you that the "relatively absolute absolute" was no temptation at all. There are some things that only Buchanan himself can do! So, "onwards and upwards" it is.

2. But is it descriptive?

As a title, though, it needs more extended defence. As Buchanan has taught me, good titles need to be not only associated with their subject matter, but also actually descriptive. Does this title qualify? After all, here we are celebrating Jim's 80th birthday. And just a matter of weeks ago, he formally retired from full-time paid work here at George Mason - signifying, if not a closure [in fact, surely not a closure] of a career for which no superlative seems adequate, then at least for most normal folk something of a winding down. And have Liberty Fund not, over the last few months, published the first four volumes of the twenty volume Buchanan collected works? Doesn't that rendering of the whole Buchanan corpus suggest that ... well, that it is pretty much the whole Buchanan corpus? In short, though there may well be a little more "onwards" in the Buchanan career, doesn't it rather strain the imagination that there could be much more "upwards"? "Onwards and downwards" would surely be no disgrace, given that the start is from such stratospheric heights. And wouldn't that, in all candour, be a more apt title?

It perhaps goes without saying that I wouldn't raise this question - at least in the present context - if I did not think I could be satisfactorily answered. So let me offer some relevant observations.

On the face of things at least, "onwards" presents no real problem. Indeed in a sense, onwards is unavoidable. As Jim has often remarked about the authority of the status quo in assessing the desirability of change, we have no choice but to go from where we are. If that expression is rendered with the emphasis on "go" rather than on "from where we are", then it becomes: "we have no choice but to GO from where we are". And that observation seems



3

no less right to me. There is a kind of inevitability about moving on, however much we might sometimes prefer that things would stay put.

There are, however, some notable features of Buchanan's particular "onwards". Recently, I was looking at the 1980 Annual Report of the Public Choice Center - then located in the pleasant environs of the President's House at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg - and looking in particular at the photographs of the usual suspects - Bob Tollison, Gordon Tullock, Jim Buchanan, David Levy, Dwight Lee, and myself. I was struck - though it should have been no surprise - by how much we had all changed in the last twenty years. Tollison for example looked a bit like the young Che Guavara - all wild hair and bushy mustachios; Dwight Lee looked about sixteen; I was almost unrecognisable. But Buchanan's appearance had hardly changed at all. And it is not just the appearance that has remained constant. During my most recent visit to the Buchanan House a few months ago, Buchanan was in residence the entire time [as distinct from being off on one of his extended academic trips, of which more anon]. I can report that he is still putting in his 6:20 am to 5:20 pm days every day of the working week and all day Saturday, and even three or four hours on Sunday morning. [I have it on good authority that he would stay longer on Sunday if it were not for the fact that doing so would expose him to the temptation of doing serious damage to some of the worshippers at mid-morning mass in the church over the way; these folk seem to believe that their religiosity gives them licence to park anywhere they like, including in the Buchanan House parking lot, thereby blocking the departure route. My guess is that said worshippers simply cannot imagine that anyone at George Mason would actually be at work on Sunday mornings. But in this respect as in so many others Jim is unusual]. He can still astound you by having comments on the paper you just gave him, typed and back in your in-tray almost before you've got back settled in your office. And he's still passing on interesting new books [many of them suggested by Frank Foreman] or articles in the most recent TLS. When I was there last, he was negotiating an extremely technical piece in a recent issue of the AER, which connected in some way to his current enthusiasm for the commons and anti-commons. Buchanan has never seen himself as a mathematician but he still labours long and hard over the journals.

He is still, of course, publishing at a rate that makes the rest of us feel

decidedly inferior. And he maintains a travel schedule of quite daunting pro- portions. He seems to travel to Europe or South America about ten times a

year, to say nothing of the regular trips to American universities, and particip- ation in professional Meetings and the occasional Liberty Fund conference. All of this, interspersed with the routine commute backwards and forwards to Blacksburg, where he still spends about a third of his time at his 'country



4

estate'. A couple of years ago, he wrote to me about a particular trip, con- fessing that he was going to have to wind back his travel. The trip in question as I recall involved going first to South America, then back to Texas, and from there on to Europe [I'm not sure whether it was Italy or Germany or both] - about three weeks away all up. Somewhere along the line - on the leg to Texas as I remember - his luggage got lost. And then in Europe he fell ill with an infection of some kind. One might think that an experience like that would cure him of travel altogether. After all, if you travel at the rate Buchanan does, the law of averages will land you with a disaster trip occasionally. But Buchanan seems to have exploited this reasoning to reach precisely the opposite conclusion - namely, that this particular trip was just a statistical outlier and gave no reason to expect any similar experiences in the future. So, with a few modifications, he is now back to his old travelling tricks. "Onwards" indeed.

Recently I myself turned 55. This is the age at which many of my local contemporaries start to think about retirement. It is the minimal age at which one can opt to take out your retirement pension; and some few do. Those that do not, certainly begin to think about it. All this tends to make you feel old; it makes you think that other people expect you to feel old. It's all a bit depressing. So I do occasionally call to mind the fact that when I first went to the Public Choice Center in 1976, a mere 23 years ago, Jim was then a couple of years older than I am now. When I think of all that Buchanan has accomplished in those 23 years, it makes it seem ridiculous to feel old or to imagine that anyone should feel old at 55. For me at least, the thought of Buchanan at 57 is invigorating - indeed, inspirational - to one of a mere 55 summers. Of course, Buchanan is in this respect exceptional and no reasonable person could hope to emulate him. But if I am as energetic and active at 60 as Buchanan is at 80 I shall be content.

"Onwards" connotes, of course, more than mere motion. It involves movement forward, with intent and purpose, with commitment, even a certain inexorableness. That too is an essential piece of the Buchanan character. And can be illustrated by appeal to a personal anecdote. Buchanan and I were travelling together to the Western Economic Association Meetings in San Francisco. As we were taking off, Jim complained of a slight ear-ache. I immediately offered him a piece of chewing gum - a well-known remedy for air-pressure disturbance; but this he politely declined. "Chewing gum gives me a head-ache", he explained. "Oh?" says I. "Are you allergic to something in the gum? That's interesting; I've never heard of anyone else having such an allergy." "No", replies the great man, "no allergy. It's just that when I get the gum in my mouth something makes me try to grind it to a



5

pulp; and all that relentless chewing gives me a head-ache." Instructive, that, I thought. There is something of that same utter commitment in the approach to his work - a quality that borders on the compulsive and indeed would appropriately be describable as compulsive if the attribute were not in part self-conscious, and ethically grounded. It is not for nothing that an important theme in Buchanan's academic work - particularly in the early 90s - has been the 'work-ethic', and how that ethic might be lifted from the level of mere intuition [which in Buchanan was doubtless strong] to the level of systematic justification within the contractarian normative framework that Buchanan has done so much to refine and promote. It is not just chewing-gum that figures here. Buchanan has, for example, a deep suspicion of intellectual games like bridge and chess; he sees such pursuits not just as distractions from one's work, but as potentially addictive ones - arenas like chewing where one's natural propensities towards focus and commitment could easily take over. He reckoned bridge at lunchtime in the Public Choice Center to be a serious and dangerous matter; and he disapproved, I suspect, precisely because he could see its attractions.

I don't mean to imply by these observations that Buchanan is a dull dog - all work and no play. In fact, the distinction between work and play is to miss the point. Buchanan's work is something he does essentially for its own sake as a kind of mental, sport; and he has too much imagination to lack a sense of humour, not least about himself. But there is also a steely sense of purpose there - a level of commitment that is extraordinary, and for those of us who share his work ethic intuitions, exemplary.

So, as I say, "onwards" seems unproblematic - even inevitable. And certainly an intrinsic feature of the Buchanan personality.

3. But what of "upwards"?

It would of course be possible to deal with the "upwards" aspect of the title in the same spirit as we have treated "onwards" - that is, by reference to attitude rather than trajectory. Existentially rather than objectively, as it were. Certainly, one cannot long go on in any creative enterprise, of which academic life is one, without the sense [the illusion perhaps] that one has yet more to say, more to add to whatever one has accomplished to that point. Onwards more or less requires upwards attitudinally. And few will doubt that Buchanan still has lots of interesting and novel things to do and say. He has a long history of surprising us with new ways of thinking and new insights about things that cause us to reassess matters we thought we pretty well had understood. It would be amazingly against the trend if Buchanan did not



6

continue to surprise us, though of course it is in the nature of surprise that we shall, when it happens, be ... well, a bit surprised.

Of one thing we can be reasonably sure in this. And that is that the surprise will come in a new area. Buchanan is not one of those scholars who goes back and reworks previous stuff. Indeed, he is a bit profligate with his creative offspring. Once they are produced and released into the public arena, he seems to have little interest in how they are being received - still less in defending them. I can recall a few occasions on which would-be critics have thought that they had a decisive argument against some current Buchanan proposition by reminding Jim that on some page of some earlier work, he had seemed to say the precise opposite. Buchanan would often confound such critics by the response: "so what?". He was never inclined to regard his own earlier remarks as authorative: he always demanded an argument not a reference - and references to the younger Buchanan carried for him no more weight than references to anyone else. He almost entirely lacks that narcissistic element that many scholars seem to have in going back and reading and rereading his own stuff. It is said of Edward Elgar in later life that he was only ever interested in listening to records of his own compositions; I am reasonably confident that Jim would regard a continuous reading diet of the Buchanan collected works as a form of torture. Not that he is not delighted, I know, to have the Collected Works published, but this for a different reason to which I shall shortly turn.

There is then no problem about "upwards" as a description of Jim's pos- ture to the future. But after fifty years of scholarship at a level so elevated that almost any description is bound to seem inadequate, a level of accom- plishment such that there are no more accolades to be won and no prizes or positions left to be sought, after all this, isn't "upwards" a little strained? What else, we may ask, is left?

There is a Buchanan story that bears on exactly this question. The story revolves around a question Jim would occasionally pose to a candidate being interviewed for a position, or in a tenure decision process. The question is in the form of a Shakespearean riddle, redolent of the one in "The Merchant of Venice". You have three choices. They are by assumption mutually exclusive. The first is that in five year's time, you can become for a year the guru of the economics profession. Your views will be sought by presidents, and your comments by the press. By common consent, you will be regarded as the most influential economist of your time. And you will be! For a year. That is the first option. The second is that in thirty years you will win the Nobel Prize for economics. The third option is that in two-hundred years, historians of thought will look back and say that, at this point in the history of economics,



7

you[X] were doing extremely significant work - the most important work, perhaps, of your time. Bearing in mind that these are mutually exclusive

options, which do you choose? It was a good puzzle. Some candidates would interpret it as an exercise

in discounting and take it that the earliest option must be best. Others would think of it as an exercise in convexity and take the middle option. But for Buchanan there could only be one appropriate answer - the third. Those who chose the third were, he thought, the true scholars - those who know what the real game is. Of course, there were other aspects to this. Buchanan has no taste himself for the first option and does not much approve of those among his professional colleagues who seek that role. He will often remark that he himself has no desire to shape the world; and his view seems to be that those economists who do get themselves into positions where they can shape the world, generally do more harm than good.

Moreover, he is mistrustful of institutional arrangements that provide scope for anyone to have much influence on the lives of others. As far as I know, he bore no particular animus to the Nobel Prize in those days before he won it. Nevertheless, it remains clear that, as he sees it, even awards of that distinction are not the main game. At best, the Nobel Prize is to be seen as an incidental consequence of aspiring to something bigger and more worthy - namely, posthumous recognition. Given the structure of the puzzle, it is perhaps ironic that Buchanan has won already what he regards as the lesser prize, but of course, the options are mutually exclusive only in the example and we should not take our examples too seriously.

What I take from this story is that there is something more that Buchanan aspires to - something more or less objective to which the "upwards" of the title can properly refer. And I want to turn now to a consideration of what this particular understanding of "upwards" involves.

There are three aspects of interest here. First, what kind of a picture of intellectual progress does this aspiration involve? Secondly, what, if anything, does the aspiration imply behaviourally? Thirdly, what pieces of the Buchanan intellectual contribution seem most likely to satisfy the

posthumous recognition test?

4. Implications of "upwards"

4.1. The nature of economic enquiry

What does the ambition of posthumous recognition imply about the nature of economics and the many related disciplines into which Buchanan has strayed over the last fifty years?



8

As far as Economics is concerned, it is common to distinguish two pictures of the discipline - one borrowed loosely from science; the other traditionally associated more with the humanities. The self-styled scientific one holds firmly to a view of more or less linear progress in the "accumulation of knowledge"; the model is one of an ever expanding stock, with limited [if any] depreciation. Within this model, mistakes can be made but the conviction is that the processes of empirical investigation will eventually weed truth out from error, and that what is worth knowing will eventually be absorbed into the corpus of knowledge. This model carries with it a particular view of the discipline's history - namely, that though looking at the work of earlier generations of scientists can serve a useful function as a kind of biographical exploration of the trials and tribulations of previous generations of scientists and as an exercise in the identification of heroes and accumulation of role models, it is not itself a crucial piece of the actual practice of the science. The history of physics may be interesting, but it is not itself physics.

Contrast this view with what I have here called the 'humanities' view. On this view, the idea of intellectual progress as such is much more ambiguous. I choose the word "ambiguous" here advisedly. I want explicitly to reject a picture in which there is no possibility of progress; for if there is no capacity for progress there is equally no capacity for genuine error. The idea that conceptions of truth and falsehood have no place in enquiry, however fashionable it may be in certain circles, seems to me to be a serious mistake. What we might loosely term the 'post-modern' mistake. The 'post-modern' view, as I understand it, makes enquiry out to be an essentially aesthetic pursuit, in which truth becomes indistinguishable from what makes a good story [with "good" here often enough understood in terms of "what is in the author's interests"]. In the proper 'humanities' view, as I construe it, there is genuine truth and falsehood, real insight and real blindness, and a continuing threat of forgetting truths that have been previously known. It is this picture, I think, that goes with the ambition embodied in Jim's third option. Because this is a picture that accommodates not just a kind of antiquarian interest in famous economists of the past but a genuine engagement across time with the minds of fellow travellers. It is not too unfamiliar an experience, in Buchanan circles, to be reading Adam Smith or David Hume and to come to the conviction that "we've got this all wrong" - that some proposition that is currently a plank of orthodoxy and which colleagues confidently assert as "something we now know" is actually misconceived. One of the lovely quotes I have learned from Jim is that wonderful one-liner of Josh Billings: "It ain't so much the things we don't know as hurts us, it's the things we



9

do know that jest ain't so". That ought to be one of the prime texts of the economics profession I reckon. It is in the same spirit as that wonderful line from Aristophanes [The Birds] that goes: "Let your intellect roam free - like a cockroach on a leash!"

My point here is that somewhere between the model of enquiry as a confident linearly progressive march into greater and greater truth and the model of it as the mere self-indulgent play of over-imaginative minds, there is a middle ground - a picture of enquiry as a precarious and tentative enterprise, where progress is possible but is hard-won, where attractive and plausible errors lure from every side, and where one of the greatest of such errors is condescension towards the past. Of course, we don't want to reify the past either. Nevertheless, it is, to me at least, an invigorating thought that we join with Smith and Hume and Edgeworth and Marshall, as well as with contemporary scholars, and indeed with those yet unborn, in a common enterprise where all enter across time as more or less presumptive equals. If one has this picture, it is certainly a natural desire to be a recognised player in that game. And that is how I read the third answer to the Buchanan riddle.

Now, I should be careful here not make Buchanan the mouthpiece for my own particular prejudices and conceptions. Buchanan's sometimes radical subjectivism does occasionally lead him to espouse views that stray closer to the post-modern end of this spectrum than I would think appropriate. But it seems to me that something of the middle ground that I have outlined is the only picture of enquiry consistent with Buchanan's stance on his own riddle - and for that matter offers the most accurate account of economics and its near disciplinary neighbours. How else, after all, is one to give a satisfactory account of the young Jim Buchanan in the stacks of the University of Chicago Library in the late 40s, taking down the apparently forgotten Wicksell habilitation thesis - and recognising there a primitive version of his own intuitions, the working out of which will come to represent a huge part of the Buchanan intellectual enterprise? How else can we give an account of the still young Buchanan recognising, in a flash of inspiration after some months of study as he strolls down the stairs in the Hotel Angloterra in Rome, that the apparently quaint position which the Italian public finance scholars had taken on the incidence of public debt was actually right - exactly against the confident orthodoxy of the time. It was this insight that generated what I think of as Buchanan's first big book, Public Principles of Public Debt - which still stands as one of the most elegant clear-sighted accounts of the public debt incidence question. Both the Wicksellian and the Italian experiences in the Buchanan story speak to



10

me of intellectual insights lost and then regained, of dominant professional errors that one has to struggle long and hard to overturn. These experiences require a picture of the nature of intellectual enquiry that will accommodate them - indeed, not just accommodate them but make them central pieces in the whole conception of what it is that we academic economists are about.

4.2. Behavioural implications

Suppose we adopt this conception of the nature of enquiry - at least in the areas of academic territory we call our own. And suppose that you, as a young aspiring academic had happened to answer the Buchanan riddle in the right way. What would this aspiration imply for the way you conduct your intellectual life? It certainly might encourage you to read more Adam Smith. Which would doubtless be no bad thing. But what of the shaping of your research agenda? Does this riddle help us to understand what Buchanan himself thinks about as he sits down to write one of his classic pieces? I suspect not. Or not much anyway. In fact, I doubt that anyone sets out in their career, picking up the pen to start on the very first paper, with the ambition uppermost in the mind of writing something that will be remembered a hundred years hence. And I am by no means sure that it would be a good thing if one did. I suspect that most of us are driven primarily by a desire to get something sorted out in our own minds, by a desire to play the academic game more or less for its own sake and perhaps, in the process, to persuade others (usually significant others like one's dissertation supervisor or some major figure in the field) that one can play that game and play it well. Whenever we write anything, it is I suppose with some audience vaguely in mind - some group or person that we want to impress with our cleverness or our erudition. But often enough, that audience is not uppermost. What is uppermost is just the game itself - the sheer enjoyment of coming to terms with ideas, of discovering that what you more or less thought before isn't quite right and indeed may even have been wildly wrong. Indeed, doing a bit of introspection myself, it is an interesting challenge to give an account of who I write for. That there is some imagined audience I have no doubt. But I am by no means sure I can identify exactly who it is. What I am reasonably sure about is that that imagined audience is not specifically composed of Adam Smith and David Hume or Alfred Marshall - and as for me, so I suspect for most of us. If posthumous recognition plays a role in our motivations, it is not because we want to impress our long-dead ancestors. Nor, though this is more plausible, that we want to impress our as yet unborn descendants. Indeed, it is something of a puzzle what role the desire to be read in a hundred years actually plays in the immediate arena of intellectual action. Yet it must play some role in



11

behaviour, because otherwise it is difficult to see why Buchanan would be interested in securing this particular answer to his riddle.

I am inclined to think that this puzzle is an instance of a more general question in economics - that concerning the connection between motivation and action. And I want to spend a bit of time exploring it.

In economics generally, and particularly in the area of institutional design or 'constitutional political economy' as we might call it, we are used to making a distinction between motivation and justification. That distinction is, for example, crucial in the analysis of invisible hand mechanisms. What is taken as the primary motivation of agents in the marketplace is self-interest: what drives me to act is that the expected outcome is good for me. But what justifies the outcome or pattern of outcomes that emerge from the market is that it is good for us. It is the 'hand' aspect of the invisible hand that justifies; but the reason why there is something to be said for its achieving its benign outcomes 'invisibly' is because the desire to produce benign outcomes as such is rather weak. If all were angels, as Madison [almost] put it, we wouldn't need the market system and/or a publicly enforced system of private property to undergird and support that system. But angels are scarce. The genius of invisible hand processes is that they achieve good outcomes without requiring that the agents who produce those outcomes are particularly benign or indeed particularly concerned with the overall goodness of the outcomes that emerge.

As I say, this distinction between motivation and justification - or what we might otherwise describe as the causes versus the reasons for action - is familiar to us. Indeed, so familiar that we often draw the distinction excess- ively sharply. My guess is that for most people justification as such plays an important background role in their behaviour and does exercise its effects at the margin. The truth of the matter is that precisely because we operate most of the time within institutions that have a substantial 'invisible hand' character - in contexts, that is, where the conflict between doing what is best for us and doing what is best for others is limited - motivation is over-determined. We simply cannot tell whether the butcher produces first-class meat out of a benign feeling towards his customers or a pride in good butchering for its own sake or in order to maximise his income. Almost certainly all of the above in some measure. We might conjecture that the butcher would not long continue in his occupation if the income from it disappeared. But then he might well also shift his activities if it came to be widely regarded in the community that butchery was an evil occupation, associated with the inflicting of terrible harms on innocent animals. Of course, if this particular view did come to be a widespread, then many people would presumably eat less meat and so



12

the butcher's income would decline. In which event, an income-based 'ex- planation' would be empirically supported, even though the motivation in play was not itself income-related. Part of the force of the observation about over-determination is that empirical evidence cannot decide the matter.

Or consider a different case, somewhat closer to home. We, being academics, are inclined to think that intellectual life is a good thing and that more people should be exposed to it and that those who are talented at it should be provided with opportunities to pursue it more extensively. Accord- ingly, academics are inclined to vote for parties and candidates who promise more money for universities. An observation to this effect can be identi- fied as evidence of pure self-interest - since as academics we are likely to benefit individually from an increased demand for our services. But this self- interest aspect may play little role in the psychology of individual voters; and your academic colleagues may feel aggrieved if you describe their conviction about the value of the life of the mind as mere demonstration of naked self- interest. Often of course self-interest has a secret life precisely because to be seen to act from self-interest is to invite disesteem - whereas to act from nobler motives is to invite the general esteem of others [and for that matter oneself]. Where acting morally and acting self-interestedly are not too much in conflict, it will be rational to adopt moral dispositions in the arena of action if you have a desire to be thought well of by others [and for that matter by yourself]. The desire for esteem, in other words, means that in invisible hand societies - societies, that is, where most of the important contexts are such that self-interest and public interest are reasonably closely correlated - publicly interested dispositions will tend to flourish. It may be thought, particularly by those with a Mandevillean cast of mind, that this flourishing reflects a form of hypocrisy. There is, after all, a real sense in which an important part of the reason why agents act out of moral considerations is that it does not cost them too much to do so. But that observation is not itself enough to show that the moral motivations are insincere. It may well be the case that what operate as the primary motivations in the arena of action are considerations like professional integrity, or public responsibility; and in particular, that a picture of the agent as acting out of those considerations is more psychologically descriptive than a picture of agent as homo economicus. But matters of self-interest may still play a crucial explanatory background role as totally indispensible 'psychological reinforcement'.

How does all this bear on the Buchanan riddle? Well, I do not believe that an ambition to be read in a hundred years time explicitly enters into Buchanan's mind when he sits down to write a paper. No more does the desire to win the Nobel prize - either for Buchanan in his pre-prize days or for most of the rest of us. Such ambitions might serve for many as a kind of vague



13

fantasy - just as the prospect of playing in the world series fires the hopeful imagination of every sandlot player. But for most of us, most of the time, what is in the forefront of our minds is the sheer intellectual pleasure of playing with ideas, of sorting out some puzzle just because it is a puzzle. Nevertheless, those things that justify the activity do hover as causal influences somewhere in the background. They may not come into play in many cases; they may indeed only operate counterfactually in the sense that they would come into play if the motivation of sheer intellectual pleasure led you to do things that would fail to be justifiable. For example, in that background role, the Nobel Prize for economics probably serves to dignify the profession, to recognise our heroes and thereby establish salient role-models for the rest of us. The point is that these background influences may shape behaviour, may raise the calibre of entrants into the profession, and may even colour scholars' research agendas - even though those influences are not explicitly entertained as reasons for action, still less as the sole determinant of a research agenda, for any of the actual players. The possibility of posthumous recognition seems to me to fit that role - it is a factor that may play a critical shaping role, but mostly quasi-subconsciously.

In a way, the precise advantage of posthumous recognition is that there is not much one can do to bring it about. That may, for all I know, be part of its attraction for Buchanan. In my experience, Jim has a healthy mistrust of public adulation - not least because of the effects it often seems to exert on the adulee. Still, if there is not much one can do to ensure posthumous recognition, there is plenty one can do to make it virtually impossible. Becoming preoccupied with little technical puzzles, or focussing attention exclusively on immediate policy issues, or just not doing much of anything. If one seeks to join the conversation with the great minds across the centuries, not as an exegete but as an aspiring participant, one had better think on a big canvas. And you had better not be content with showing how clever you are: something more than mere native 'smarts' will be required.

4.3. But what of Buchanan's work will survive this test?

At the most general level, it seems clear that Buchanan has got the problem of maximising the survival chances of his ideas pretty much right. He has worked on big questions and with an agenda that is large in scope and com- pass and that is identifiably and distinctively his own. It seems unlikely, for example, that public choice economics, or "rational actor political theory" as it is coming to be known, will ever entirely disappear from the intellectual landscape, whatever happens. The field may be co-opted by the technocrats. It may be taken over by the New England academic establishment in such a way that Virginians gradually diminish in the citation lists to be replaced



14

by a more recent set from more fashionable stables. There is already some signs of these developments. But I think such considerations are of more relevance to second generation Virginia School scholars than to Buchanan himself. Likewise, constitutional political economy seems set for a continued life; and though that area of enquiry may be more and more connected with political philosophy [and political philosophy more connected with it] the academic habits in political philosophy of honouring and engaging the great minds of the past seem likely to ensure that Buchanan will still be read and argued over a century or so hence.

There are, however, other aspects of Buchanan's thought - no less central in the whole Buchanan intellectual scheme - that might have a harder time of it. The subjectivist element, for example, which seems possibly too sparing of positive results to endear itself to economists across the board. It is hard for scholars to admit that they do not and indeed cannot know the answers to a range of questions that other scholars in the same field do profess to know. Genuine subjectivists will, for this reason, probably always be a kind of prophetic minority in the economics profession.

Likewise, possibly, Buchanan's contractarianism. There is, it seems to me, a strong tidal pull in economics towards consequentialism - indeed towards utilitarianism, often of a rather crude kind. And though simple 'economic utilitarianism' has taken quite a few knocks as a normative scheme this century, consequentialism of a broader kind does seem to be enjoying a revival in economics, even in those areas which are most inclined to be philosoph- ically self-conscious. Part of the difficulty here lies in a tension evident in Buchanan's own work. In some places, the contractarian scheme seems to play the role of a conceptual test attempting to indicate what could plausibly be agreed by a community of more or less rational individuals. In other places, the possibility of such an interpretation is overthrown by the limits Buchanan places on what can plausibly be known. It is impossible to predict what can be agreed if nothing at all can be known about the content of individuals' preferences/values. Here, only actual agreement can provide any sort of ethically compelling contractarian test, and apart from insisting on unanimity (at the relevant constitutional convention stage), it is not clear what of any use further normative analysis can add.

Of course, the question as to what ideas will survive and flourish over a horizon even of twenty years, let alone a hundred, is a matter of total spec- ulation and it would not be sensible to hazard more than the most tentative conjectures about it. I am certainly not saying that the subjectivist and contractarian elements in Buchanan's thought do not deserve to survive, or that they are not critical pieces in the whole Buchanan intellectual scheme. Indeed I rather think the opposite. The point I seek to make is that the desire to have



15

one's work survive does not in Buchanan's case determine or much shape the agenda - and still less the content of Buchanan's writings. One wants to be heard - but not because one slavishly delivers the message one thinks the audience wants to hear. Posthumous recognition can work as a reward, perhaps even at an appropriately abstracted level as an incentive, but it cannot plausibly work as a motive in the arena of action. At the keyboard, it's just a matter of saying something that is, first of all, right and second, interesting.

Let me try to summarise. My object in this discussion of the Buchanan riddle has been to explore briefly three matters: first, what I think this riddle implies about the nature of economic enquiry; secondly, what role if any the possibility of posthumous recognition properly plays in academic life, and what kind of influence it has exercised in the Buchanan case specifically; and thirdly, what pieces of the whole Buchanan scheme seem more likely (and what pieces less likely) to satisfy this recognition test. In the process, I have been led to offer some general remarks about motivation in rational actor social analysis, and to gesture at the causal role that certain 'demand-side' influences may play even where they do not figure significantly in the actor's conscious deliberative processes. It is tempting to observe at this point that how much, and precisely what, of the Buchanan contribution is flourishing two hundred years hence, depends less now on Buchanan himself and rather more on us. Not that we should be, or need to be, self-conscious promoters of Buchanan's ideas. [Though I cannot refrain from noting at this point that the Buchanan Collected Works project, graciously advanced by Liberty Press, will serve to make available those ideas in a neat and highly accessible form - and not only for the present generation]. But for the most part, the Buchanan legacy is there in our intellectual genes, probably well beyond our conscious- ness of it. I have in mind here nothing much more than our determination to stay active and to do the best work of which we are capable. That and the confidence to imprint our students with the characteristic Buchanan virtues - utter commitment, a love of ideas rather than fancy tricks, and a desire ultimately to engage with large, serious questions with scholars beyond one's own blinkered time. This done, Buchanan's ideas can be safely left to look after themselves.

5. The personal legacy

There is of course another dimension to any academic's legacy - that is, the influence, outside the written work, on students and colleagues. Any student of Buchanan's [which I am not - at least in any formal sense] cannot help but be aware that he/she stands in a long tradition of distinguished scholars who all share that feature. All of these will have their own stories to tell



16

about the experience of Buchanan as teacher. I can speak of Buchanan as colleague - but again as only one of a large number, all of whom carry with them something distinctive that they owe to Jim.

I want to record three things from my own experience here. First, Buchanan is an extremely generous person to collaborate with. I have, over my career so far, been involved in a large number of co-authorships. Some of these have been pretty tricky. Often scholars do not like their deathless prose changed; often, they become absurdly committed to their own little spin on an idea. I confess to these inadequacies myself. Buchanan is remarkably relaxed on these fronts. Not only is he not obstinate about his own drafts - but he is remarkably generous-spirited about his co-author's drafts as well. This is not to say that he is uncritical. Entire chapters have on occasion had to be jettisoned - almost invariably for what I later came to realise were ex- cellent reasons. And any co-author will recall certain grammatical strictures like the distinction between "between" and "among", or the objection to the unattached "this". And stylistic rules, like his antipathy to "Thus". He was quick too to expose sloppy exposition or confused reasoning. But he was quite tolerant of all those stylistic eccentricities which sadly abound in the Brennan prose. Writing with Buchanan was a remarkably easy as well as instructive experience.

Second, Buchanan is a wonderfully generous colleague in another way. I would often appear in his room with a half-baked idea or give him some half- worked out notes on something I had been thinking about. He quite routinely would think for a while - and then say: "you know, that's interesting, really interesting". Of course, what was interesting about what was before him was what he had made of it in his mind - leaping forward to implications I had not foreseen or to reformulations that I had not even imagined. The point here is that younger colleagues find that sort of response intensely affirming. Being disposed to find one's colleague's work interesting is one of the most valuable attributes you can cultivate in becoming yourself a good colleague. This is a lesson I have learned from Jim Buchanan; and I regard it as an important lesson.

I am reminded in this connection of an occasion very early in my initial spell in Blacksburg. I was visiting with my wife and young family including Michael my son then aged five. Buchanan and I and Mark Crain had participated in a local television interview on tax reform; there was a studio facility set up by VPI on the campus for the purpose of getting a little exposure for the academic staff. The broadcast was some days later about six in the evening: and all the family foregathered on the parental bed to watch Daddy on the TV. [For some reason, the TV was in the main bedroom]. The interviewer settled on me first; and after I had delivered myself of a few



17

remarks on the subject, the interviewer turned to Professor Buchanan and asked: "And what do you think, Mr Buchanan?". And Jim responded: "Well, I agree with Geoff here". Whereupon Michael turned on the bed to look at me wide-eyed and said with total awe: "Daddy, Daddy, Mr Buchanan agrees with you!" One of the great moments of my life! As we get older, it becomes harder and harder to impress our children. Michael was impressed that day - and rightly so. If I ever write an academic autobiography in the style of Jim's "Better than Ploughing", I fancy that I might give it the title: "Mr Buchanan Agreed with Me". I was talking earlier of titles: this one seems to me to have much promise.

There are more Buchanan-Brennan stories that might be told. Our occasional huge battles about organised religion, for example. Or our exploits of endurance with Hartmut Kliemt, in the great Blacksburg blizzard of 1993! What is important about all of those stories, I find on reflection, is that they reveal in different ways what a great and generous colleague Jim is and has always been to me. And what a huge influence in so many incalculable ways. I am in this sense typical, I believe, of all those who have had a personal association with the man. Students, colleagues, friends - whatever the precise connection - we have been privileged to rub shoulders with the great! And that experience has greatly enlarged our lives.

6. Conclusion

There has been a poem that has vaguely hovered in the back of my mind as I have written this talk. It is a piece of Tennyson - not normally my favourite poet. But this poem has struck me as apt for three reasons. First there is an explicit Australian connection. Although it is not widely known - even in Australia - Tennyson's eldest son was Governor of Australia in the early part of this century (1903-04, to be precise, after being Governor of the State of South Australia for some years previously). Secondly, the poem deals with Ulysses who, as most of you will know, adorns the front of the journal Constitutional Political Economy as the logo appropriate for the analysis of institutions [a reference to Ulysses' negotiations with the Sirens]. And third, the poem is constructed around the idea of an ongoing quest - one that might well be interpreted in intellectual terms. In this poem, Ulysses is old. In the most general terms, it speaks to the question of how to deal with age. The poem has a distinctly stoic quality; it calls for continued journeying without illusion - what we might loosely think of as "onwards without romance"!

I shall not quote here the entire poem. It is rather long. But the excerpts I have taken are long enough to give you a flavour of the poem's spirit and a sense perhaps of why it has struck me as appropriate.



18

[fragments from] Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson

"...I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That lov'd me, and alone;.. ... I am become a name, For always roaming with a hungry heart; Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, myself not least, but honoured of them all; And drunk delights of battle with my peers Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy....

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is sav'd From that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

... Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.

... Come my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off and sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. ... Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Mov'd earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made old by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Or, as Jim himself would say, "onwards and upwards"!



Documents

Onwards and Upwards: James Buchanan at 80