Andrew Hartman has an essay at The Baffler arguing that “libertarianism is a political philosophy
shot through with white supremacy. Public choice theory, a technical language
nominally about human behavior and incentives, helps ensure that blacks remain
shackled.”
I have pointed out before that I am not a libertarian. I
have been critical of libertarians on several occasions (for instance, here
and here)
. I am not associated with George Mason, not paid by the Koch brothers, and not
really a big fan of James Buchanan. So why bother writing this? I do have an
interest in public choice, and I find the recent attempts to bind racism,
Buchanan, public choice, libertarianism, and the Koch brothers into a neat little bundle ridiculous.
Below are quotes from Hartman’s essay (in bold) and my
responses to them.
IN DECEMBER 1992, AN
OBSCURE ACADEMIC JOURNAL published an article by economists Alexander
Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, titled “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun.”
Tabarrok and Cowen, who teach in the notoriously libertarian economics
department at George Mason University, argued that the fire-breathing South
Carolinian defender of slaveholders’ rights had anticipated “public choice
theory,” the sine qua non of modern libertarian political
thought.
That obscure academic journal is The Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. While it
may not be The Baffler, it has been
around for over 150 years, and Nobel prize winners, such as Oliver Williamson,
Douglass North and Ronald Coase have published in it.
Public choice theory,
which grew in stature across the late twentieth century and is now a bedrock
conservative doctrine marketed to right-wing policymakers by the billionaire
Koch brothers, has indeed tilted the scales of justice in favor of the white,
rich, and powerful.
Libertarians seem unaware that Buchanan’s public choice
theory is the thing without which their philosophy cannot exist. Milton
Friedman does not refer to Buchanan or public choice in Capitalism
and Freedom. Robert Nozick does not mention Buchanan or public choice in Anarchy,
State and Utopia. David Boaz can put
together a 600 page Libertarian
Reader that has just a handful of references to public choice and no
readings from Buchanan or Tullock. On a personal note, I was once invited to a
lunch where John Allison former head of BB&T and a well-known libertarian
spoke. I remember him talking a lot about Aristotle, but I don’t recall any mention
of Buchanan or any other public choice theorists. I’m not suggesting that there
are not libertarians who like Buchanan’s work, but I don’t see a case for the
claim that it is regarded as an essential ingredient.
In marking Calhoun’s
political philosophy as the crucial antecedent of public choice theory,
Tabarrok and Cowen unwittingly confirmed what critics have long maintained:
libertarianism is a political philosophy shot through with white supremacy.
Public choice theory, a technical language nominally about human behavior and
incentives, helps ensure that blacks remain shackled.
Cowen and Tabarok did not mark Calhoun as a crucial
antecedent of public choice. To the contrary, they argue that economists have
ignored Calhoun. It would be more accurate to say that they argue that although
Calhoun did not influence the development of public choice theory, there are
some interesting similarities. They note some of these similarities, but also
point to significant differences. Including the differences that enabled him to
include support for slavery in his philosophy.
The sheer volume and
intensity of these protests suggest that MacLean’s observations have hit a
nerve. And by historicizing the putatively neutral and scientific character of
Buchanan’s research, MacLean has apparently shaken the pediment supporting the
altar of this libertarian saint.
Apparently, Hartman regards it as noteworthy that calling
someone’s friend a racist would strike a nerve. I’m not sure what to make of
that. As for neutral. I don’t know of anyone who would argue that Buchanan’s
work was neutral. Buchanan had values that he argued for throughout his career.
There is just no evidence that racism was one of them.
Just as Calhoun
developed his novel political philosophy in response to the growing fear among
his class of southern slaveholders that a Northern majority might seek to
abolish slavery, Buchanan’s public choice theory was an innovative approach to
resisting federal enforcement of civil rights in the South.
Hartman simply parrots MacLean here. They use innuendo to
create a link between Buchanan and segregation, while ignoring the well
documented intellectual context in which Buchanan was working. Buchanan was one
of a number of people in the 1950s and 1960s working on applying economic or
rational choice methods to the analysis of politics.
Buchanan saw his work as part of this broader movement. The
following quotes are from a talk
he gave on public choice theory at Hillsdale College in 2003
“Public choice should be understood as a research program
rather than a discipline or even a subdiscipline of economics. Its origins date
to the mid-20th century, and viewed retrospectively, the theoretical “gap” in
political economy that it emerged to fill seems so large that its development
seems to have been inevitable. Nations emerging from World War II, including
the Western democracies, were allocating between one-third and one-half of
their total product through political institutions rather than through markets.
Economists, however, were devoting their efforts almost exclusively to
understanding and explaining the market sector.” He goes on to explain that he “entered
this discussion with a generalized critique of the analysis generated by the
Arrow Black approach.” He also describes the 19th century thinker
who influenced his work. No, it was not Calhoun. It was Knut Wicksell.
Oddly, Hartman cites S.M.
Amadae, but seems to have missed Amadae’s description of this broader
context, Amadae describes Buchanan’s early essays as responses to the work of
Ken Arrow and his Calculus of Consent
(with Gordon Tullock) as “a new analysis of the rapidly forming study of
politics that had been articulated by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern,
Duncan Black, Arrow, and Arrow’s student Anthony Downs.” (Amadae 136)
Buchanan was part of a movement to develop a rational choice
approach to politics. He also had normative views about what government should
do. These beliefs were essential to James Buchanan, but not central to public
choice. Being interested in a rational
choice approach to politics does not require that one hold any specific set of
normative beliefs. A rational choice approach to politics has been followed by
people as disparate views of what should be as James Buchanan, Amartya Sen,
Howard Rosenthal and Jon Elster.
Other people involved in the development of a rational
choice approach to politics, such as Anthony
Downs, Amartya
Sen and Mancur
Olson, also viewed Buchanan’s work as part of this broader movement and
engaged his arguments in their work.
If Hartman is right, then he and MacLean have seen through a
false facade that fooled all of these other scholars. Buchanan somehow managed
to hide his true motives from all of them, tricking them into believing that,
like them, he was trying to understand
collective decision making, when in fact he was simply working to preserve race
based segregation.
As opposed to wishing
to free the masses from a state controlled by the capitalist elite, Buchanan wished
to free the capitalist elite from a state controlled by the unruly masses. And
this returns us, suitably enough, to John C. Calhoun.
Public choice theory is interesting and important because recognizing
that the state is composed of human beings means that the state can be
controlled by an elite that oppresses the masses or a majority that oppresses a
minority. The outcome depends upon the
institutions for making public choices. Some of us hope that it is possible to
have institutional arrangements that protect the majority from a despotic elite
and protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
In the end, there is no evidence for Hartman’s argument and
considerable evidence against it. Public choice theory did not develop out of
the work of Calhoun nor was it an outgrowth of attempts to preserve segregation
in Virginia. Buchanan was influential in the development of public choice, but public
choice theory is not synonymous with the thought of James Buchanan. Buchanan and public choice theory are not the
sine qua non of modern libertarianism. In fact there is no necessary connection
between public choice and any set of normative beliefs.
In the end, I am puzzled why Hartman would choose to write
an essay about something that he obviously has so little interest in? He doesn’t
appear to have made any attempt to learn anything about the history of public
choice theory beyond reading MacLean. He
could have written a better informed essay if he had read the Wikipedia page on
public choice.