The Soul of Classical Political Economy: James M. Buchanan from the Archives
基于布坎南档案中的文献，梳理其政治经济学思想的核心，展示弗吉尼亚学派的独特性和布坎南对古典政治经济学的继承与创新，适合经济思想史和公共选择研究者参考。
James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) was a prolific scholar. Over six decades, he wrote many monographs and hundreds of papers. Twenty volumes of his collected works were published by the Liberty Fund at the turn of the millennium (Brennan, Kliemt, and Tollison 1999–2002). Buchanan did not actively engage in politics, but he was an academic institution builder: he cofounded the Thomas Jefferson Center (TJC) at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1957, then the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech in 1969, which he moved in 1983 to George Mason University, where it is still located today. The questions Buchanan and his colleagues asked, and the methods they used to answer them, led fellow travelers to speak of a distinct Virginia school of political economy within the broader public choice research community. The identity of the school was the subject of a recent volume by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart (2020), but it is also a central theme of the book under review.Boettke and Marciano curated a set of papers from the 280 linear feet of archival material in the Buchanan collection at George Mason University to characterize Buchanan's “political economy.” The book comprises seven parts, each thoughtfully introduced by the editors. Boettke and Marciano are certainly among the most astute readers of Buchanan's work. Totaling sixty-eight pages, these introductions painstakingly reconstruct Buchanan's ideas on various subjects, bringing to light the impressive coherence of his positions over the years. In some cases, the short pieces by Buchanan selected for the volume appear rather like appendixes to great essays by the editors. The topics range from public finance, ethics, economic methodology, and the organization of scientific activity to political theory and the financial crisis of 2007–9. One section stands out. Taking more than half of the volume, it is composed of fifteen lectures (by fourteen men and one woman) delivered at George Mason University between 1985 and 2001. The first ones are reminiscences of the academic life at the University of Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (as Virginia Tech was known at the time) or explicit reflections on the specificity of the Virginia school and will thus be of special interest to historians of twentieth-century economics (D. C. Mueller, W. Breit, D. R. Lee, L. Yeager, R. J. MacKay, C. J. Goetz). Others showcase the range of topics to which public choice analysis can be applied: from international relations, the welfare state, and organ donations to time, education, and the medieval Church (T. D. Willett, E. K. Browning, R. B. McKenzie, H. Kliemt, E. F. Toma, R. D. Tollison). Unsurprisingly for the period, the decline and fall of socialist regimes is also a recurring theme (G. Brennan, P. Bernholz, M. Olson).In which sense does Buchanan embody the soul of classical political economy? Nowadays political economy is used to label many different strands of literature. One thing is certain: in the case of Virginia, political economy has nothing to do with the labor theory of value. A prospectus of the TJC from 1958 announced that the center would study the foundations of a “good society” of “free men,” taking seriously the “ideals of Western civilization” (83, 87). From David Hume, Buchanan and his colleagues took on board the assumption that in politics “every man ought to be supposed a knave.” In addition to the centrality of self-interest in guiding individual behavior, Buchanan shared Adam Smith's optimistic outlook about the capacity of market forces to sustain individual freedom, justice, prosperity, and harmony, provided that the right institutions are established. Yet, the Virginia connection with classical political economy goes further. In his lecture, Charles J. Goetz argued that economists walk in the “footsteps of Thomas Malthus,” “naggingly talk[ing] about hard choices and the gloomy constraints of grim economic reality” (202). Perhaps also echoing Malthus and his friend David Ricardo, Dwight R. Lee argued that Gordon Tullock was right to point out that “more government has resulted in less for the poor” (140). In a similar Malthusian spirit, Edgar K. Browning suggested that a core problem of the welfare state was the “incompetent and irresponsible” parents of the “underclass”—“perhaps the best solution would be that these persons not have children” (329).In other respects, Virginia political economy is very much a product of the twentieth century. First, the constant appeal to a value-informed, yet positive, inquiry by Buchanan and others is a post-Weberian methodological position that does not make sense in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century economic discourse. The editors show very well that Buchanan understood the ethical foundations and implications of public finance and constitutional political economy. Still, a tension between Buchanan's desire to put forward political proposals while maintaining that he was not pushing his own values in the public sphere permeates his whole career. Already in 1963, the TJC was internally challenged by the UVA administration, who considered that its economists were pursuing a one-sided ideological approach described as “neoliberalism” (76). Decades later, Buchanan still claimed that “public choice is a positive analysis, totally divorced from ideological precommitment” (415). And yet, in his 1993 lecture, Mancur Olson remarked that “the Virginia School ought to put more effort into separating its scientific achievements from the ideologies and political movements with which they are sometimes associated” (237).Second, what separates the liberal political economy of the mid- to late twentieth century from its Enlightenment forebear is the extension of the franchise in the nineteenth century. Buchanan's theory of politics revolved around a conceptual separation between the rules of the game enshrined in a constitution and the postconstitutional level of daily political decisions. Unusual among economists, Buchanan held to a deontological approach to politics (397). In that respect, his political philosophy is to be compared with that of John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek. It owes more to Kant than to Bentham. To an outsider not versed in academic literature, Buchanan's political writing sounds utterly theoretical, with his insistence on “quasi-unanimity rules” and the “relatively absolute absolutes.” The editors are mostly silent about Buchanan's politics, in the common sense of the word. However, two texts included in the volume give the reader useful hints. In a private memo from 1962 addressed to an internal committee, Buchanan defended the specificity of the University of Virginia. Its comparative advantage in the higher education market was to be Southern and Virginian, that is, it belonged to a “conservative tradition,” and it was philosophically Jeffersonian in its defense of “human liberty” (97). Years later, in a speech delivered in Japan, Buchanan would blame the government for “the erosion of the traditional moral order in America” (64). However, the most interesting text in the volume under review is a speech given a few months later at the Mont Pèlerin Society regional meeting in Chile and titled “Democracy: Limited or Unlimited.” Constitutional constraints on the government's capacity to tax and spend seem to have taken increasing importance for Buchanan over the years, but further historical work is needed to pinpoint this shift, if any, in Buchanan's writing. In Chile in 1981, Buchanan was clear that a constitutionally constrained but undemocratic government “may well be preferred” to an unlimited democratic structure in which all decisions are made by parliamentary majorities (410). One year after the election of Ronald Reagan, Buchanan remarked that “temporary periods of office by leaders who share our ideological precommitments can be—and must be—put to good use by using the scarce time to design and to implement new rules that will at least be quasipermanent elements of the social fabric” (416).Boettke and Marciano have put together a very interesting collection of texts by Buchanan and his colleagues that help us get a better understanding of the specificity of the Virginia school and of Buchanan's idiosyncratic, yet influential, approach to political economy. Their well-written and insightful introductions reconstruct the theoretical coherence of Buchanan's ideas and retrace their origins, especially in the field of public finance. More work should be done on the politics of members of the Virginia school along the lines of Biebricher 2019, Kuehn 2022, and especially Cooper 2021 (although the latter contains some flaws). Moreover, while the influence of Knut Wicksell and Frank Knight on Buchanan's early work has been well documented, that of Hayek and ordoliberals on his writing in the 1970s and 1980s deserves more historical scrutiny. The volume edited by Boettke and Marciano is an invitation to continue research on the history of twentieth-century political economy. At just under $8 for the paperback edition, there is no reason it should not find its way onto the bookshelf of all historians of public finance, political economy, and public choice, as well as of scholars interested in the evolution of neoliberal ideas.