The Right's View from Nowhere
False humility launders nihilism
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
It’s not uncommon to hear “free market” libertarians defend their position with a kind of humility: we don’t know what’s good for anyone, so why not let everyone make choices for themself? This is part of a defining strategy in right-wing economic thought: claiming the authority of science to make political judgments while rejecting the possibility of actually using evidence to arrive at political or ethical conclusions. In the mind of the right, legitimate judgments can only come from ignoring reality— whether that means pretending to take view from nowhere, like libertarians, or embracing supposedly eternal false categories like race and nation as the only valid truths.
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Economist James McGill Buchanan’s 1962 Calculus of Consent, co-written with fellow economist Gordon Tullock, offered thoughts on “what we think a state ought to be.” Buchanan was another product of the postwar right-wing economic nexus; he was a student of Frank Knight’s and a convert to early Chicago economics. Buchanan and Tullock answered their question– what ought the state be– in a manner quite similar to one of this newsletter’s familiar villains: Herbert Spencer.
Buchanan and Tullock rejected both practical experiment (history) and ethics (philosophy) as guides– they might be unreliable. Instead they relied on logical and mathematically reasoning from first principles: methodological individualism, psychological egoism, and rationality (defined through the branch of mathematics known as set theory). Buchanan more generally aimed to be a “disinterested observer.” Practical political conclusions in Calculus of Consent, to the extent they existed, were largely anodyne if conservative: in effect, they legitimized a restrictive understanding of American constitutionalism by arguing for majority rule only within limits.
Buchanan’s 1975 work The Limits of Liberty, which was much more explicitly partisan than Calculus, makes clear what his idea of a disinterested observer actually meant in political practice. In the book’s opening, Buchanan renounced his own “private preferences” as insignificant, and claimed we cannot know what is good. Political philosophers, Buchanan claimed, often described democracy as a process of gradually coming to a greater truth together, but they were wrong. “Truth” in politics is impossible, and the collective is a mirage. Morality is merely individual preferences. Without anyway to arbitrate between those preferences, “betterness” could only be defined by expanding “individual freedom.” This was almost exactly Herbert Spencer’s argument, from its methodological individualism to its rejection of ethics to its libertarian conclusion.
In fact, let’s put Spencer next to Buchanan and Tullock:
Spencer, 1851
Treating therefore as it does on the abstract principles of right conduct, and the deductions to be made from these, a system of pure ethics cannot recognize evil, or any of those conditions which evil generates. It entirely ignores wrong, injustice, or crime, and gives no information as to what must have been done when they have been committed. It knows no such thing as an infraction of the laws, for it is merely a statement of what the laws are. It simply says, such and such are the principles on which men should act; and when these are broken it can do nothing but say they are broken.
Buchanan and Tullock, 1962
We must also emphasize that our behavioral assumptions do not properly introduce an ethical question. We have tried to apply the economist's assumptions about human behavior in an analysis of political choice. There is nothing moral or ethical about an analytical assumption. Disagreement may appropriately arise concerning the empirical validity of the utility-maximizing assumption, but this is a matter that may conceptually be subjected to empirical testing through the comparison of the real-world implications of hypotheses developed on the basis of this assumption and real-world observations. No issue of "right" or "wrong" in an ethical sense need be introduced at all.
Both passages feature a dismissal of normative considerations– ethics on which we might base any higher, not purely competitive theory or practice of politics, or any claims about justice. Spencer, Buchanan, and Tullock insisted on the separation of the normative and the positive in their analysis of human affairs. But they did so in a way that demoted ethics into a “private preference” at odds with hard reality– with how the world really works– and promoted their own system, which they argued was legitimate precisely because of its amorality. Their and Spencer’s shared positive assumptions about humanity were inextricably linked to their shared normative framework: from the model of humanity as selfish individuals, they derived the ironclad conviction that only maximizing the individual’s ability to act, as an individual, was right. There was no alternative.
These two passages are different in an important sense: Buchanan and Tullock are more circumspect in their claims. They do not defend their assumptions of methodological individualism and utility-maximizing self-interest as literally inviolable, and they encourage comparing them to reality. But they do not engage in that comparison, nor do they meaningfully engage with others who do. They advised “the reader who is critical of the behavioral assumption employed here” to “reserve his judgment of our models until he has checked some of the real-world implications of the model.” By leaving this exercise to the reader they avoided having to confront reality themselves. Buchanan praised analysis that “accepts the morality of the scientist and shuns that of the social reformer,” but like so many right-wing economic thinkers before him– Mises, Hayek, Spencer, even Mandeville– Buchanan was not a scientist. He ran no experiments, and compared no data.
He did not have to: what made his work objective and scientific was his rejection of morality rather than serious involvement with the reality he claimed to describe. The “morality of the scientist” for Buchanan meant amorality. “Those of us, individualists and nonidealists, who reject the truth-judgment approach,” he wrote, must engage in “diagnosis rather than dreams.” Buchanan dismissed as naive or tyrannical those “social reformers” who sought to determine and create a “good society.” These idealists risked the destruction of the existing “social capital stock” represented by status quo laws and norms– this, he said, was the “ominous threat posed by the 1960s,” which came with “behavioral changes” that raised “fundamental and disturbing issues for social stability. Groups that claimed to seek the public interest were merely engaged in the pursuit of “special interests,” a term that became a common feature of the Republican lexicon. Unions and environmentalists were no better than the oil industry– pressure groups all, enforcing their private preferences on the public with the malicious power of the state. To ask collective action to be anything more was futile. This is where “how the world really works” cynicism gets its power: not by embracing reality but by rejecting aspirations.
Economists like Buchanan rejected both morality and alternate models of human behavior as part of their claims to objective scientific authority. They then proceeded to wield that authority in the political sphere as experts and intellectuals. In so doing, they asserted that models which disregarded ethics could and should be used to change the world. Counterintuitively, Buchanan and Tullock’s separation of the normative from the positive was part of a political project that collapsed morals into mathematics, right into might, and voting into markets.
Buchanan, like many of his colleagues in the right-wing economic world, preferred markets to democracy. The Austrian School’s Ludwig von Mises waxed poetic about the virtues of the market, as not only a democracy of dollars but a democracy better than democracy itself: “on the market no vote is cast in vain.” Citing this analysis from Mises, Buchanan explained that markets operated along a kind of unanimity: if I wish to transact with someone, a third party is always free to jump in and offer alternative terms of exchange. In the political realm, Buchanan believed, a cobbled-together majority of partisan “special interests” could run roughshod over individual preferences through the violent force of the state. In contrast, the economic world of the market was, like so many before and around him had said and were saying, free.
It was the supposedly voluntary nature of markets that made them so appealing to Buchanan. He believed unanimity, not democracy, was the ideal decision-making standard for society– naturally, since we cannot know what is right, nor can we find truth together. In practice he recognized many important political decisions required lower standards. Thus individuals might contractually– through a constitution– consent unanimously into a regime that enables subsequent decision-making under supermajority or majority rule. Buchanan was not as anti-state as, say, Murray Rothbard, and his thought tended toward defenses of the capitalist status quo. But his ideal order, as he explained in Limits of Liberty, consisted of individuals with property and property-like rights making market-like transactions– a world of voluntary and rational trades rather than political ideals.
The notion that markets and economic contracts are “voluntary” rests on an illogical distinction between social and natural coercion. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick used this distinction explicitly in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in which he argued that “whether a person’s actions are voluntary depends on what it is that limits his alternatives. If facts of nature do so, the actions are voluntary.” On face this is frivolous. Imagine a number of passengers in an overfilled life raft are forced to choose to push some of their number overboard to keep them all from drowning. “Facts of nature” are the only thing limiting choices to “kill or die.” But most of us, if we were placed in this situation, would not say I chose to kill someone, we would say I had to kill someone. Certainly it would not feel like a voluntary choice.
More importantly, in political reality rather than thought experiment, most of our choices are constrained by a combination of natural and social circumstances. We are forced to pay for food or rent by both the natural fact of human metabolism and the social realities of private property and market dependence. Land is limited and human beings are hungry, but only in a particular social arrangement of private property does this become an obligation to sell our labor to an employer in order to obtain currency to buy food from someone else’s employer. Because this transaction involves non-natural limits, by Nozick’s standards, it should actually still be considered involuntary.
Libertarian contrasts between the “voluntary” market, or economic power, and the “coercive” state, or democratic power, justified and advanced inequality. These thinkers frequently made methodological and philosophical comparisons between markets and democracy. The most obvious objection to such comparisons is that poor citizens do not get equal “voting rights” on the market the way they do at the ballot box. . For Ludwig Mises this was fair, because “this inequality is itself the outcome of a previous voting process.” Prior market operations were all “voluntary,” so whatever resulted from them had to be just.
This ridiculous standard of justice flows directly from libertarian’s bogus “objectivity.” We can’t know what’s right, Buchanan and company claim with false humility, so we must let each individual choose for themself. In reality, they support individual choice as both a moral standard and a political and economic principle because (and only insofar as) it produces the specific political and economic order that they like. Allowing us to take a moral position together and then realize it in the world through democracy would mean allowing us to actually take on injustice collectively rather than — to build a better life raft together instead of having to push anyone out to drown alone. This they cannot abide.