Table Of ContentWhy 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
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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
Description:Nobel Laureate James Buchanan collects in this volume original and recent hard-to-find essays exploring liberalism and conservatism as distinct ways of looking and thinking about the realm of human interaction. Classical liberalism is presented here as a coherent political and economic position, as
