capitalism

40 Buchanan, James M. (1919– )
found demonizers and beatifiers as scholars and activists
continue to debate both the moral and strategic merits of
Brown’s plan. Some give Brown the credit or blame for
helping to trigger the Civil War, whereas others speculate
that if emancipation had come through Brown-style slave
insurrection rather than Union occupation, the freed blacks
might have been spared a century of Jim Crow and the
country as a whole spared the federal centralization consequent
on Union victory.
See also Abolitionism; Civil War, U.S.; Revolution, Right of;
Slavery in America; Spooner, Lysander; Thoreau, Henry David
Further Readings
Abels, Jules. Man on Fire: John Brown and the Cause of Liberty.
New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Carton, Evan. Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of
America. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of
John Brown. 2nd ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1984.
Renehan, Edward J., Jr. The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men
Who Conspired with John Brown. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1997.
Reynolds, David S. John Brown. Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed
Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New
York: Vintage, 2005.
Sanborn, Franklin B., ed. The Life and Letters of John Brown,
Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia. Boston: Roberts
Brothers, 1891.
Shively, Charles. “Critical Biography of Lysander Spooner.” The
Collected Works of Lysander Spooner in Six Volumes; Volume
One: Deist, Postal, & Anarchist Writings. C. Shively, ed.
Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1971. 15–62.
BUCHANAN, JAMES M. (1919– )
James M. Buchanan is one of the originators of public
choice theory and among the foremost economists of the
20th century. Together with Gordon Tullock, Buchanan
revolutionized the way economists view political economy
by introducing motivational symmetry between public and
private actors. Before Buchanan’s contributions, it was
standard practice to view market failures as prima facie evidence
of the need for government intervention. Public
choice theory forced scholars to confront the fact that government
failures may be worse than the market failures the
government is introduced to correct.
James Buchanan was born in October 1919. After serving
in the U.S. Navy, he enrolled in the economics doctoral
program at the University of Chicago, where he received
RL
his doctorate in economics in 1948. When he started at
Chicago, Buchanan considered himself a “libertarian
socialist.” A price theory course taught by his mentor,
Frank Knight, convinced Buchanan that the market was the
most appropriate means to the ends he desired as a libertarian.
In addition to having been exposed to Knight’s work
while at Chicago, Buchanan also became familiar with the
writings of Knut Wicksell and the Italian school of public
finance, all of which would have a profound influence on
his contributions to political economy.
Between 1956 and 1969, Buchanan taught at the
University of Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic Institute
(VPI). While at VPI, Buchanan created the Center for the
Study of Public Choice. In 1983, he was prevailed on to
move with the Center to George Mason University, where
he has remained since. In 1986, Buchanan was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Among his most important
books are The Calculus of Consent (1962), coauthored
with Gordon Tullock, and Cost and Choice (1969). He later
turned his attention to questions of social philosophy,
publishing the Limits of Liberty (1975), Liberty, Market
and State (1986), and The Economics and Ethics of
Constitutional Order (1991). In these works, he laid out a
contractarian theory of political philosophy that emphasized
the need for establishing “rules of the game” to constrain
self-interested political actors where their interests do
not align with those of the public.
Buchanan is best known for The Calculus of Consent,
which was coauthored with Gordon Tullock. This work
opened up the theory of public choice, still in its infancy,
and refocused the profession’s attention on a realistic versus
a romantic conception of politics. Against the prevailing
tendency in political economy, Buchanan and Tullock
argued that private costs and benefits guide individuals’
decision making in politics just as they do in markets.
Simply moving from the private sphere to the public does
not transform interests from those that are self-concerned
to those that are devoted to the public good. Depicting
politicians as benevolent despots is therefore foolhardy.
Realistic political analyses must start with the same
assumptions about rationally self-interested behavior as
economic ones.
Buchanan’s “economics of politics” transformed political
economy on several fronts. Implicit in its conclusions
were questions relating to, among others, problems of functional
finance, the theory of rent seeking, and democracy’s
short-sighted policy bias. Perhaps most important for
advocates of the market, his theory provided a powerful
warning against government intervention. To believe that
government can correct market failures, we must first
assume that political agents charged with this task desire to
pursue the public good. Buchanan also argued against the
ability of political actors to identify the public good.
Furthermore, we tend to assume that, when confronted with