The book discusses Buchanan's own individualism as well as a broadside attack upon individualism by Roberto Mangabeira Unger of the Critical Legal Studies movement. It then expounds Bunge's metaphysics in lay terms and applies it to Friedrich Hayek's dismissal of social justice as a mirage, to Ayn Rand's concept of natural rights, and to the evolutionary federalism of the social psychologist Raymond Cattell. It concludes by arguing for a plurality of contracts.
CHAPTER 1: JAMES McGILL BUCHANAN AND INDIVIDUALISM
1.1. The Work of Buchanan
1.2. Buchanan's Individualism
1.3. A First Move away from Strict Methodological
Individualism
1.4. New Contractarian Man
1.5. The Methodological Meaning of the Unanimity Rule
1.6. Additional Requirements for New Contractarian Man
1.7. Potential Abuses of the Unanimity Criterion
1.8. Duties to Obey the Laws?
1.9. Contractarianism and Natural Rights
1.10. Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER AND COLLECTIVISM
2.1. Unger's Characterization of Individualism
2.2. Buchanan's Implicit Agreement with Unger
2.3. Unger's Criticisms of the Individualist World View
2.4. The Factual Basis for the Separation of Theory and Fact
2.5. Unger on the Separation of Reason and Desire in
Individualism
2.6. Response to Unger
2.7. Unger on the Separation of Public Rules and Private
Values
2.8. Response to Unger
2.9. Unger's Evolutionism
2.10. Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: MARIO AUGUSTO BUNGE AND SCIENTIFIC METAPHYSICS
3.1. The Aim of Bunge's Philosophy
3.2. Bunge's Furniture
3.3. Bunge's Systemism
3.4. Bunge on Mind
3.5. Bunge's Systemic Conception of Society
3.6. Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK AND THE MIRAGE OF SOCIAL
JUSTICE
4.1. Hayek's Own Argument against Social Justice
4.2. The Metaphysical Issues in Hayek's Argument
4.3. Progressive Taxes Not Necessarily a Mirage
4.4. Multi-Generational Social Contracts
4.5. Elitism
CHAPTER 5: AYN RAND AND NATURAL RIGHTS
5.1. Similarities and Differences with Contractarianism
5.2. The Arguments for Natural Rights
5.3. The Advantages of Contractarianism over Natural Rights
5.4. Value and Fact Again
CHAPTER 6: RAYMOND BERNARD CATTELL AND EVOLUTIONARY
FEDERALISM
6.1. The Self of Self-Interest
6.2. Teleology
6.3. Cattell's Morality from Science
6.4. Criticism of Cattell
6.5. The Ontology of Federalism
6.6. Problems for Contractarianism in the Composition of
Countries
6.7. Evolutionary Morality
6.8. Conclusion
ENDNOTES
APPENDICES
No. 1. Egalitarianism as a Morality Racket
No. 2. Review of Robert H. Frank, _Choosing the Right Pond_
No. 3. Review of David Gauthier, _Morals by Agreement_
No. 4. Contracting for Natural Rights
Bibliography
About the Author
Name Index
Glossary
Subject Index
Man as a Part of Nature Subindex
Divine Subindex
0.1. Philosophy suffers from an excess of convoluted introspection. One result is that concepts multiply unchecked. That some events have observable causes gets reified into a First Cause or, in a more secular age, to the thesis that every event is fatalistically determined. Another drawback of convoluted introspection is that tiny but crucial assumptions slip in, often unawares, with the result that densely argued counter-tomes are written in reply and no progress is made toward any kind of consensus. At bottom, subjectivity reigns.
0.2. I exaggerate. Toward the other pole of the subjectivity- objectivity continuum, consensus among scientists is in fact always at a good healthy distance from compulsive unanimity. New theories replace old, and at any one time the evidence can usually be interpreted two ways. Indeed, it is possible to pile epicycle upon epicycle in the Ptolemaic system of the heavens and approximate the ellipses planets travel in the Copernican system. What cinched the case for Copernicus was not simplicity--after all alchemy is simpler than chemisty. Nor was it experiment--there were no moon shots back then. Rather it was Newton's foundations. He established a physics for the earth and the heavens alike. Earthly physics we can verify, and it does not jell with the Ptolemaic system.
0.3. Indeed, striving to make subtheories jell with one another is a major aim of scientific research. Think of relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, or of micro- and macro-economics. Think also of why most scientists reject parapsychology as quickly as they do. By the 1890s, the sciences had advanced to the point that the great Charles Peirce called for a grounding of their underlying assumptions in a scientific metaphysics.
0.4. Eighty years later, Mario Bunge was the first scientist to carry out Peirce's program. I shall expound his results in non-mathematical detail in Chapter 3, but for now only a few remarks. First, Bunge treats metaphysics as a science and therefore controllable by the results of other sciences. Bunge's scheme is the *first* such carrying out of Peirce's program, not the last. Second, Bunge strives to keep his metaphysics quite general. For example, his chapter on change comes before the one on space and time. This way, should relativity theory get modified, Bunge may not have to revise his concepts and results on change. He may have to anyhow, which only goes to show that his whole enterprise is open to revision. Third, science, including scientific metaphysics, is bound to conflict with naive, however convoluted intuitions. One resists changing one's intuitions, but this is what learning is all about.
0.5. This book is about liberty, and my basic aim is to set it well within Bunge's metaphysics. Here are several of his theses I shall be adopting:
0.5.1. *Emergentism*. The world is layered in systems: physical, chemical, biological, social, and (parallel with social) human artifactual. A chemical system is made up of atoms and molecules, but it has properties, such as a boiling point and availability to participate in chemical reactions, that are peculiar to it and not to its constituents. A living organism has properties (metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis) that cannot be attributed to its constituent molecules. And a society is more than a heap of people: It has a legal system and an economic system, things no individual person has. At the same time, a system is not a holistic entity transcending its parts: There is no Society apart from its members.
0.5.2. *Reductionism*. While we cannot eviscerate emergent properties by bulldozing them down to their parts, science strives to explain emergence by means of lawful interaction among the parts. In other words, epistemological reductionism, si; ontological reductionism, no.
0.5.3. *Causality*. Each scientific law statement separates the set of all conceivable things and events into two subsets, the possible and the impossible. But there is no reason to suppose that the intersection of the sets of possible things and events corresponding to each law yields a single, fatalistic outcome. Self-determination and chance, as well as causes, remain as determiners of events.
0.5.4. *Free will*. Neurologists, unlike mind-body dualists, are busy studying volition. The answers are not in yet, but given Bunge's views on causality and self-determination, there is no ontological compulsion to hold that choice is at best an illusion. A fuller solution to the problem of free will will make heavy use of the structure of manifold feedback loops in animal brains and of their consequent extreme instability as far as action goes. Human brains are even more cross-wired than those of other animals. and this makes for our apparently unique ability to be self-conscious, or conscious of our own consciousness. We can direct our learning, too, and (as Bunge points out) reason about values as well as evaluate reasons. It is wonderful to know that the first scientific metaphysics not only allows for the emergent property called free will but also for its explanation.
0.5.5. *Values*. Animals and only animals evaluate. (Humans can evaluate values and, to a fair extent, train them, e.g., by taking music appreciation courses.) It is at best metaphorical and at worst mystical and holistic to speak of Society valuing. This is not to deny that individuals can share similar values or that socialization can reduce conflict. It does imply that social and political institutions must be systemically rooted in individuals though not ontologically reducible to them. Champions of "methodological individualism" are never clear whether they are ontological reductionists who consequently reject systemic metaphysics. A major purpose of this book is to bring these issues to the surface.
0.6. These, then, are five main theses I have taken over from Mario Bunge. My aim is to extend the discussion upward to the subject of human liberty in a way that is consistent with his system. This way, political philosophy will not have to float above the other areas of philosophy. I take as my starting point the contractarianism of James M. Buchanan, an economist and one of the Founding Fathers of the extension of economics to political behavior that has become known as public choice theory. Philosophers of the social contract too often *tell* the alleged contractors what they have agreed to. An economist far more habitually reckons in terms of agreement, bargaining, compromise. The economist's approach is the more metaphysically sound, since only individuals value. That individuals individually value, that is value differently and hence need to strike bargains, is an inescapable part of the human condition.
0.7. In the course of discussing Buchanan, in Chapter 1, I argue that his individualism needs to be tempered in order to make a social order viable, and in Chapter 2, I analyze a broadside attack on the underlying assumptions of modern individualism by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Chapter 3 expounds Bunge's metaphysics, and the last three chapters apply it. Chapter 4 examines Friedrich Hayek's thesis that social justice is a mirage and concludes that certain moderate kinds of it need not be dismissed as resting on bad metaphysics. Chapter 5 examines Ayn Rand on natural rights and concludes that her arguments, while too weak to compel wholesale adoption, nevertheless might generally be utilized by social contractors in their deliberations. Chapter 6 examines what I call the evolutionary federalism of the social psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell, and discusses a plurality of social contracts both extending over space and enduring over generations. Above all, it is up to the contractors themselves, not to philosophers or economists, to establish their own political institutions by way of ideally unanimous agreement. (That the social contract is, of course, a historical fiction, will be discussed repeatedly.)
0.8. To the extent that my general approach and specific arguments are sound, I shall have laid out a framework for what could, very dangerously, be called scientific political philosophy. The danger is that "scientific" much too often connotes socialism, rule by experts, or just one big scheme for all mankind. This sounds orderly, especially to those yet to learn that order regularly emerges by processes of spontaneous self-assembly at all levels of systems, from chemical and biological on up. (Economics may well be the oldest science of spontaneous order.) But what looks orderly can mean just being ordered about. Truly rational planning (meta-planning) should consist of knowing when not to plan (object-plan), that is when to call off the bureaucrats.
0.9. It's okay to consult experts and even to trust them a little bit. It's okay, too, to put a little faith in tradition, to wait until a serious probing of a specific tradition's uses has been undertaken before throwing it to the winds. Indeed, some people have come to love their traditions and even want a large hunk of their lives so governed. That's okay, too, and in a finely enough partitioned federalism, each can seek out his preferred tradition-experiment balance. It would be most unscientific to ignore the central fact of both individual and group differences in this regard, and in all other regards.
0.10. It would be no less unscientific to ignore what ever-corrigible results have come down from the various social sciences, some of which apply to all men and groups alike. My aim here is not to beat a drum for any specific economic or social theory or even to claim a single economic law is true, not even that minimum wage laws cause unemployment or that rent controls cause housing shortages. I know plenty of people who will argue both economic laws tirelessly and for free. I could also argue on either public choice theory or natural rights grounds that education and money are too important to be left in the hands of the government. And I could warn against theocracies of all kinds, whether they be any of the hundreds of possible kinds of egalitarianism or interpretations of the Bible.
0.11. It is altogether too easy to denounce those who disagree with me as being unscientific. The plain fact is that people vary in their willingness to get at the truth, and it is they, not I, who will establish their own polities. I must not get carried away with my own arrogance. My plea is that others not get carried away with their own *metaphysical* arrogance and reify entities like Society and The Good that are detached from the ontological chain. There are not very many open advocates of such holism and collectivism anymore, but there are far too many who assume such things implicitly. It is more muddled than openly bad metaphysics that is the enemy of liberty.
0.12. I hope this book will clear up some of the mud.
0.13. As it happens, I wrote a short article for _Vera Lex_, called "Contracting for Natural Rights," that summarizes many of my ideas beyond the metaphysical base in Bunge. This article could continue this preface, but since it can stand alone, I reprint it in an appendix.
1.1.5 _Calculus_, while making a fundamental breakthrough into objectivity and a fundamental distinction between alternative constitutions and their operations, left a number of questions (some of which indeed were first raised in the book) unanswered. How might agreement upon a constitution come about in the first place? What about the breakdown of constitutional order? What about government itself violating the constitution? What are the prospects for reform? Buchanan was then led, from public finance to public goods, to public choice, beyond to what might be called public philosophy, to deal with these questions. Deal with them he did in 1975 in _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_,^ a new look at the idea of a social contract, and it is this book, which has easy claims for being his magnum opus, that will form the basic backdrop for this book.
1.2.3. Buchanan also denies the collectivist thesis that there are values apart from (and therefore in conflict with) those held by individuals. It is difficult to imagine what those values could be, however, and to turn up an example of a collectivist who holds to such values and has arguments for them would also be difficult. Perhaps what is meant is the specification of an overriding social objective (such as democracy, equality in one of its many forms, _ad majorem dei gloriam_, economic growth, or someone's personal list of natural rights), a specification *against* the wishes of the citizens. Politics involves compromise, to be sure, but compromise applies to the making of laws under a constitution, and not to the making of the constitution itself, which can emerge only by agreement.
1.2.4. Again, Buchanan sees a collectivist as one who judges the constitutions made by others as a presumptuous outsider and not as an insider, not as one of the initial contractors whose consent is needed. Perhaps he means by a collectivist an avowed irrationalist like Hegel. Buchanan is unclear on this point, and necessarily so, for those who might plausibly be placed in the collectivist camp are far from clear about what they do mean. Are they arguing for "some transcendental common bliss," which may turn out to be only a reification of some set of aims individuals might share separately? Are they denying the distinction [p. 5:] between constitution and laws made thereunder, or are they failing to make the distinction in the first place? If the last, clarification is needed, for there may be fundamental disagreement. Until clarification is made we may be sure that each will invent straw men for adversaries.
1.2.5. Buchanan's (methodological) individualism is not reducible to direct advocacy of individual liberties in the usual sense meant by free-market economists, whether argued on efficiency or natural rights grounds. (I shall be examining the case for natural rights in detail in Chapter 5 ["Ayn Rand and Natural Rights"]. Ordinarily economic liberties are implicitly taken to cover only bilateral agreements (contracts and exchanges) between two persons, actual persons or "legal persons" such as corporations. Buchanan explicitly treats multilateral agreements by all members of society, called social contracts. While it is automatically understood that a two-person agreement is necessarily mutual, that is to say unanimous, confusion may arise if unanimity is not required for multilateral agreement. Buchanan's treatment recognizes public goods and a constitution specifying the procedures to supply them from the outset, whereas those who begin with only individual liberties usually wind up compromising on their principles on the grounds that protecting of rights and supplying externality internalizing public goods necessitate some restrictions on individual freedom. Theirs is a "natural rights, but..." position, which can be construed as modestly collectivist. By explicitly allowing omnilateral (to coin a neologism) contracts, Buchanan is a more thoroughgoing *methodological* individualist, in that there is no need to go beyond the individual's own values to deal with the public goods problem.
1.2.6. _The Limits of Liberty_ applies this basic methodological approach to the questions of liberty and social contracts by beginning with the most abstract special case of a two-person, one-good society and becoming progressively more general. The book discusses the assignment and enforcement of rights, the limits of collective power, the public goods aspects of law itself, the capital investment aspects of adherence to rules, and the question of the control of the government itself. I shall trace his discussion and try to discern where certain assumptions beyond strict methodological individualism are implied or warranted.
1.2.7. The second chapter of _Limits_, "The Bases for Freedom in Society," treats the emergence of law out of anarchy. It deals with the most elementary setting, that of two persons and one good. Before the pair come to any agreement, each will exert efforts to produce his own quantities of the single good, efforts to seize the other's output, and [p. 6:] further efforts to prevent such seizure of his own holdings. An equilibrium will emerge among production, predation, and protection, but no more needs to be specified about abilities, desires, or selfishness along these dimensions. It is from this starting point, which Buchanan aptly terms the "anarchist equilibrium," that the two parties may begin to negotiate some mutually beneficial pact to reduce their predation and protection so as better to turn their efforts to production. Among possible peace pacts, any one might be chosen, if both parties see themselves as benefiting. The elementary case becomes only slightly more complicated when more than one good may be produced, for post-constitutional (post-peace-pact) exchange becomes possible.
1.2.8. An assumption is implicit even in this elementary situation, namely that making the pact itself is not (or at least is not expected to be) an empty exercise. It need not be claimed that the signing of the pact is embellished with sacred rituals, though it may have some kind of nonrational binding force, but there must be some mutual hope that the amounts of predation will not continue as before, even if there will be some cheating. Buchanan is definitely not assuming that anarchists will become "moral" by the mere act of signing a pact, and he is agnostic on the question whether human nature is such as to make people want to abide by their agreements. This has, of course, been argued both ways, but people can and almost always do set up enforcement mechanisms, particularly if the population is at all large. As Buchanan notes (LL 188), "The necessity for including enforcement provisions in the initial agreement distinguishes the social contract from other contracts which are made within the framework of a legal order."
1.2.9. It is worth stating again that Buchanan says nothing to judge any particular contract as fair or unfair. Indeed, he briefly mentions the possibility that one person enslaving another by contract could leave the latter better off than in an al~-out belligerent anarchy. (Whether there are individuals who would, truly knowingly, sell themselves into slavery is another matter.) An external observer with pretensions to knowledge of absolute values may judge the position of the second person here as unfair both before and after the peace pact, but Buchanan's concern is with the dynamic processes of mutual improvement, not judgments of any static present. This may offend our moral sense, at least certain people's moral senses in certain cases, and Buchanan can be and has been charged with worshipping the status quo and naively failing to realize that the current wielders of power are going to get the long end of the stick in any [p. 7:] bargaining over the social contract. Buchanan never quite adequately handles this problem, but it can be *mitigated* (though not solved in the abstract) with one small, optimistic, but plausible assumption (assuming also that we recognize the problem as real in the first place), namely that unfair advantage dampens over time. We all know the saying, "riches to rags in three generations," and there is suggestive empirical evidence for this in the work of Herbert Simon in "A Model of Business Firm Growth" (1967)^. He asked the question: How do U.S. firms that have over-average growth rates in one four-year period fare during the next? He expected a certain regression toward the mean, since above average growth can be a matter of chance, but not perfect regression, since it can also be a matter of superior ability. The result of his study was that the ratio of the growth rate of a given firm to that of the average firm in one four-year period would shrink to about its cube root in the next. Thus, a firm with twice the average growth rate in one decade would have 26% over the average the next. (Actually, it was 28%.) This shrinkage should follow a geometric progression, and a firm with an "unfair advantage" whose initial growth rate was double the average initially would hold only a l.0 percent advantage a century later (1.28 exp 4/100 = 1.010).
1.2.11. The whole issue of fairness is problematic. Those who felt that they got the short end of the stick in the original contract may very well maintain later that their consent was not genuine and attempt to renege on the agreement. Buchanan discusses calculations of prospective revolutionaries plunging society back into anarchy in hopes of securing a new and better contract in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, "Continuing Contract and the Status Quo." This topic will be discussed further below, and I shall [p. 8:] be examining Hayek on social justice in detail in Chapter 4.
1.3.3. This move is a necessary one, however, if the chance of reaching unanimous agreement is not to become practically zero in all but small numbers cases. When we treat Roberto Mangabeira Unger's _Knowledge and Politics_ (1975)^ in the next chapter, we shall see that the assumption that desires are arbitrarily diverse among persons is a key principle of post-medieval Western thought. What Buchanan has assumed is that we can identify holdouts, although at times quite imperfectly. This assumption strips the analysis of generality, but it does allow us to discuss agreements. Something more is implied however: The assumption suggests that there is a certain core essence of humanity that we have access to, or rather that there is a certain similarity among men. It is not a large step from this to saying that some values are held in common and are, in a sense, objective.
1.3.5. This is not a fatal objection to Buchanan's ideas, however, but it does embody a warning not to take them to ridiculous extremes. Probably every social philosophy contains such loopholes. The reason why most ideas can be carried to ridiculous extremes is that the world is more complex than our limited vocabularies. Science is the method for clarifying our concepts as we go along by checking them against reality. When we speed merrily ahead, piling up deduction upon deduction without checking against the facts, our ideas will stray away at a geometric rate from what we are trying to describe.
1.4.2. Even if we ignore the problems of knowing when these conditions exist and ignore the problems associated with opportunity costs (both discussed above), a merely conceptual contract will not have the binding force an actual one would. It is an imperfect substitute for the real thing. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the charge will be made that *reality*, not the theory, is imperfect. It often does seem that utility theorists berate men for not living up to their axioms of rationality (a different set of axioms for each theorist), and utopians of all stripes excuse the failures of their schemes for never having really been tried. Communism *will* produce Lenin's New Socialist Man, given enough time. And so forth.
1.4.3. I shall call Buchanan's conception of a contractor *New Contractarian Man*. Indeed, I shall suggest that the broad sweep of human history may be towards increasingly contractual thinking, and thus Buchanan's contractarianism may become ever more realistic and less and less wishful. On the other hand and 71 years on, New Socialist Man seems no closer to being realized today than in 1917.
1.4.4. Rationalizations become desperate when reality stubbornly refuses to move into line with the ideal. On the other hand, if reality and ideal seem not very far apart, and to be moving closer together, then the theory only fails in the sense that all abstractions must. Buchanan's unanimity concept could be regarded as either/or, whence in all strict logic it fails, or it could be taken as an abstraction, whence a 99% unanimity is very different from a 1% unanimity, which would have been good enough for Lenin. When the Bolsheviks took over from all the leftist forces remaining, he explained, "The people wanted the Constituent Assembly summoned, and we summoned it. But they sensed immediately what this famous Constituent Assembly really wanted. And now we have carried out the will of the people, which is All Power to the Soviets." (Shub 1950:152)^
1.5.2. The voters, all of whom have read _Calculus_, know all this and opt for the 5/6 rule rather than a simple majority. We, the omniscient outside observers, will then judge legislation that could have been passed under the 5/6 rule as good in a Pareto-efficiency sense and regard laws that could not have been so passed as coercive. This contract never took place in our history, but we think or pretend that everyone would have agreed to the 5/6 rule. It is plain that many laws currently on the books could never have mustered a 5/6 majority, all the more so since all three branches of our government have repeatedly exceeded even the powers it seized in 1789. "The Threat of Leviathan," (Chapter 9 of _Limits_), then, is hardly Buchanan's parading his own values; rather it is his considered judgment of how far government has exceeded any authority it could possibly have gained under any unanimous social contract whatever. Anyone who thinks that our government is of optimal size, in any Pareto sense and not just in his personal opinion, had better be prepared to roll out powerful arguments in support of his position.
1.5.3. This, then, is the common sense thrust of Buchanan's idea of a conceptual contract. It is when we get picky about the logic (and therefore when we lose sight of the common sense thrust) that numerous nasty problems arise. In the first place, men are, to some extent, innately disagreeable. In any group of a hundred, the chances are near 100% that at least one person will refuse to sign the contract, and unanimity minus one is not unanimity. (Adding in minors, the retarded, the insane, and the just plain ornery makes agreement even less likely.) Second, as Buchanan himself notes in Chapter 8 of _Limits_, people are inclined to regard the social contract itself as a public good and are therefore disinclined to become informed and make adequate judgments. Third, Karen Vaughn argues in "Can There Be a Constitutional Political Economy?" (1983)^ that not only is very little known about the consequences [p. 14:] of political constitutions, there is nowhere nearly the extensive self-correcting feedback characteristic of frequent and numerous exchanges in economic markets. Any convergence to an optimum will be exasperatingly slow, and equilibrium may never be reached. Buchanan, however, freely admits that a given constitution need not be Pareto optimal, and so Vaughn's objection is a matter of degree.
1.5.5. A fourth problem with the unanimity ideal is that circumstances change, as Vaughn says later in her paper. This need not necessarily be a problem, especially under omniscience and immortality, for the contractors can theoretically draw up a contract lengthy enough to handle all future contingencies, or at least do the best job they can. But the best job might not be a very good one, and in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, Buchanan discusses the possibility that changes in technology or other underlying conditions have changed the perceived anarchist equilibrium out of which the social contract arose in the first place, meaning that a quite different contract might be drawn up now. Some will prefer that things stay put, but they may also fear that changes may be imposed upon the constitution without their consent and offer some compromises. Perhaps we are getting sidetracked here, for we are now without the world of unanimity, but recall that the signing of a contract may have some nonrational binding force and assume this force decays over time. Then the problem is a real one, and is usually handled by amendment procedures requiring less than unanimity but more than that required for the normal passage of laws. In the United States, the rules of procedure each house of Congress establishes for itself enjoy a variable degree of respect intermediate between normal lawmaking and constitutional amendment. These [p. 15:] safeguards are often informal, and public choice theorists could examine whether these informal arrangements might be replaced with more formal ones.
1.5.6. Buchanan does not adduce any historical examples of changing circumstances leading to changes in the (perceived) underlying anarchist equilibrium, and it is not always an easy matter to conceive what they might be. For some, of course, it is very easy indeed, and conservatives and communists join hands in detesting capitalism and its unjustified power. Constitution-making is a serious business--the unanimity requirement will make it one!--and considerable effort will be made to distill the wisdom of the ages into a form of some permanence. Not all of the Founding Fathers foresaw the coming of industrialism, true, but they had reason to hope their attempts to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" would suffice, whatever the future might bring.
1.5.7 The future brought an erosion of liberty, even as it brought industrialization, and Buchanan rightly notes that the Fathers concerned themselves with the concentration of power to the neglect of the extent of power. But this shows, it seems, a failure of design. Vaughn thinks changed values are more important, and perhaps she is right. Let us save space by not offering any theoretical or historical arguments for the best candidate yet for an absolute truth, namely that power will accumulate unless fought every inch of the way. Now if values change so that people are less willing to pay the price of liberty, which is eternal vigilance, [3] freedom will decay. This is so regardless of any written constitutional safeguards, as it is a reasonable observation that mere words, while not without their nonrational binding effects, are rarely in themselves so powerful as to override the tendency of power to accumulate.
1.6.2. It may be countered that these claims of so-called common sense are spurious, that unfreedom is the world and historical norm, that men are hardly ever so sweetly reasonable. Still, the notion of a conceptual contract is not without its uses as a litmus test. There remains a major difference between what ideally reasonable men might conceivably agree upon and what they never could. Observers will, of course, dispute specific cases, and part of the dispute will be over what an ideal man should be taken to he. We must grant him a degree of wisdom and a degree of thoroughness in his deliberations not much less than that of our hypothetical outside observer. We grant him maturity not to whine or seek to undermine a constitutional order that did not meet up to his expectations. We expect of him a similar patience should his values change as time passes on. And we expect of him an impartiality or magnaminity such that he will not exploit the unanimity rule to bargain on his own behalf.
1.6.3. Of such wise and noble men, then, are Buchanan's conceptual contractors made up. To these splendid qualities, perhaps two more should be added. One is that those who are violating the current constitution with impunity not regard their violations as part of the _de facto_ status quo and hold out for their "rights" to future predation. Buchanan's treatment of this problem is ambiguous (LL 96-98), but it is hard to specify what predation is when it has gone on for so long that it melds [p. 17:] into accepted custom and tradition. Furthermore, while predation or just plain inefficiencies are a net (Paretian) loss, would-be predators compete among themselves to get into privileged positions and eventually drain away all profits to predation. There come to be no winners, only losers (most of us) and those who stay even. Theoretically, there are Pareto optimal ways out, but they can be far from easy to implement. *Who* is to be compensated? The current rent holders? The ones who invested in but failed to get predatory positions? The rent holders, most of them long since departed, who made a net profit from their rent-seeking? It would seem unfair to take away without compensation a taxi medallion from an owner who paid the market price for one of the 11,772 allowed in New York City. It would also be unfair to tax the citizens the market price and hand it over to the medallion owner, when most taxpayers do not use taxis and it is hard to identify those who do. (In theory, one could set taxi rates between the market and currently regulated prices and pay the difference between the new and market prices to the current medallion owners, but this raises other problems, especially statistical ones.)
1.6.4. To get out of this bind and barring immanent resolution of the problems of economic theory and data collection, we must either presume again that our contractors are impartial or that the reforms will be so broad-based that practically everyone will be better off in the net, that is, after his particular racket is taken away from him. This would be what Buchanan calls a "constitutional revolution," as it is far more encompassing than piecemeal reform. It seems reasonable, however, that Buchanan was momentarily forgetful about just how myopic people are when he wrote "Beyond Pragmatism: Prospects for Constitutional Revolution," the last chapter of _The Limits of Liberty_, particularly when it comes to their own protected turf. Either that, or they are extremely risk-averse. Not without reason, for reforms have a habit of getting bogged down, and few want only their own privileges taken away.
1.6.5. The other requirement that might be attributed to New Contractarian Man is a lack of petty emotions, such as envy and resentment. These emotions, which can be quite strong, practically characterized democracy for H.L. Mencken (1928 and a sizable fraction of his other works)^ and brought forth one of Ayn Rand's most splendidly polemical essays, "The Age of Envy" (1971)^^. Buchanan is perhaps equivocal here, for while he evidently does not favor envy, he might be taken as implying that not only might the rich be wise to save their necks by compromising with the howling mob (especially if the perceived underlying anarchist equilibrium [p. 18:] has changed) but possibly there is a certain merit to the mob's complaints. (LL 80-81, esp.) His argument shifts from the operation to the violation of the constitutional order and back, sometimes so quickly that it is difficult to say whether he is speaking ideally or really.
1.6.7. Envy and resentment are different and imply an income redistribution beyond what is rational in terms of the last paragraph. A man quite free of both envy and resentment now might realize he could become full of them under changed conditions and not want to arbitrarily block off in advance their political expression. Officially, economists of the value-free persuasion would note that the petty emotions are just as real as the more exalted ones and that they would be imposing their own values to approve of some and disapprove of others. What value-free economists *can* make is a factual claim that contractors who are both wise and impartial would realize that giving free reign to pettiness would undermine the constitutional order itself. In the final chapter, I shall discuss the work of the social psychologist Raymond Cattell and consider how findings in his field, as well as those from economics, might be utilized by the contractors.
1.6.8. In all this, we are not asking, we are *telling* Buchanan what his contractors must be like and thus moving further away from a methodological individualism that takes individuals as they actually come with all their innate quarrelsomeness and other objectionable features. In some respects we must do this: Men as they in fact are will not come to [p. 19:] unanimous agreement about anything except in very small groups. Some restrictions on what the contractors must be like must be made; otherwise, the use of the idea of a conceptual contract to look at legislation has zero content from the very start. It is vacuous to say that what counts is the fact of agreement, not the content, if agreements are never possible. But as soon as restrictions are imposed upon the values and characteristics of the contractors, possible contents are restricted too and therefore do begin to matter. The question is how far we may go adding these restrictions without approaching scholasticism and talmudic deductivism.
1.6.9. Happily, the question may be regarded as an empirical one, and this amounts to asking what it takes, for a given population, for a viable constitutional order to come about, that is, one that will be immune from violent revolution or the less openly violent but steady usurpation of power. No constitution can be expected to last forever, but we suspect that the Founding Fathers, had they had today's hindsight, might have better prevented the slow usurpation of power. We will get different answers about what it takes, and the problem is a matter of degree anyhow (and also a matter of values, since people differ in how sure they want to be that the constitution will last). Buchanan might find that a rather minimal set of restrictions on the characteristics of the agreers will suffice and that our more expanded set demands persons somewhere between Parson Weems' characterization of George Washington and that given of Mr. Jefferson each year on Graduation Day at the University of Virginia. One will simply have to listen to the various arguments and decide what sorts of rules are needed, at a minimum, for a viable constitutional order. Then, one may form an opinion as to whether a given law could conceivably be the product of one or another viable constitutional order.
1.6.10. Again, all this imposing of psychological restrictions upon the social contractors is moving away from strict methodological individualism. In fact, Buchanan's own ruling out of strategic bargaining at the constitutional stage could be read as supposing that social contractors, rather than somehow pre-agreeing (a social contract to make a social~ contract?!) to set them aside, have little propensity to engage in such bargaining in the first place.
1.6.11. In this connection, it is instructive to note that, whereas Buchanan devoted only a small space to John Rawls' _A Theory of Justice_ (1971)^ in the closing pages of _Limits_, he was later to write several articles about Rawls' work. In a recent summing up of his life work, "Better than [p. 20:] Plowing" (1986b)^^, Buchanan remarked that his own constitutionalism (as opposed to just enacting all laws in one fell swoop) implies an uncertainty of the future which puts individuals in a state of ignorance not unlike that under Rawls' veil of ignorance. I will argue in Chapter 4 that this uncertainty is such a broad feature of the human condition as to be not implausibly called a metaphysical fact.
1.7.2. In the limit, these fine, upstanding men will come to agree with--me! Therefore, any law I don't happen to approve of--I do pretend to be impartial, however--is necessarily one that could never conceivably have arisen out of *any* social contract. This is an easy trap to fall into and one Buchanan might be said to be not entirely immune from, as it comes out [p. 21:] quite clearly that he holds that the present situation in America could not have come about by procedures unanimously consented to and therefore had to have resulted from the usurpation of power. I think I exaggerate and am being too rough, but it is remarkable that Buchanan holds out constitutional revolution (that is, unanimously-consented change) as plausible and not just possible. It is safe to say that he would not so hold out, had not his learning in economics and public choice theory given him a good idea in what directions such a constitutional revolution might go and that they *would* go somewhere in the direction his learning suggests. In other words, Buchanan more than hopes that contractors would not set up a socialist state.
1.7.3. Can Buchanan now stand accused of reversing the very first sentence on page one of _Limits_: "Those who seek specific descriptions of the 'good society' will not find them here"? It is hard to claim that he reverses himself any more than the inherent difficulties with strict methodological individualism require. Buchanan's hopes are not germane unless they color his views of what restrictions will have to be placed on the personalities of the contractors (such as being agreeable, wise, and impartial) and of what values are not legitimate (bargaining considerations, perhaps envy). But place certain restrictions he must, in the only reality we have. Buchanan's treatment of possible contracts is very broad and there is no attempt on his part to link any restrictions on the contractors to his view that constitutional revolution is feasible. It is here, in these pages, not in _The Limits of Liberty_ that the need for restrictions is argued. Perhaps the restrictions we have suggested as necessary in order to get a workable constitutional order may be acceptable to Buchanan or to others, and they may entail a sort of contract natural rights holders and/or certain free-market economists would enjoy. In fact, Buchanan has been regularly roasted for declining to favor particular schemes (Buchanan and Samuels 1980), and he is hardly unique in claiming widespread dissatisfaction with the present mess nor for thinking that there is something better that virtually everyone should be able to agree upon. What does set him aside is an awareness that the only reform that could command nigh universal assent would have to be sweeping and that piecemeal proposals would surely be resisted by someone, if not a substantial minority.
1.7.4. What is of more concern here than trying to fix the restrictions on social contractors and contracts is to consider the implications for methodological individualism, strictly construed. As said above, it is [p. 22:] difficult to get a fix on just what methodological individualism is. If it entails that values can be known only in the context of an agreement, this entails a certain degree of objectivity of values, for (so we have argued) only a proper subset of all possible agreements can be viable. This runs head against the doctrine of (absolute) subjectivity of values that is part and parcel of both methodological individualism and orthodox economic theory. We also run into the ban against interpersonal comparisons of utility if we are to exclude pettiness and even strategic bargaining from having a legitimate place in constitution formation.
1.8.2. It is not clear whether this is a problem for Buchanan, since he never makes the normative claim that men *ought* to live up to their agreements. In fact, he repeatedly deals with the prospect of men violating their agreements. Yet in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, he states that if the government can arbitrarily change rights, "there is no requirement that its actions be 'honored' with ethical sanctions." (LL 83-84) The converse statement--that when the government cannot arbitrarily change rights, its actions ought to be honored--does not strictly follow, but we do not think Buchanan is making an empty statement, which would be the case if he never held that ethical sanctions are appropriate, which in turn would mean that he has no normative judgments at all to offer.
1.8.3. To imply, however, that there are duties of the citizen to the state, in *this* world where there are no actual social contracts, is collectivist at least in some sense, or else the notion involves stretching the idea of a conceptual contract beyond its methodological value. In the wrong [p. 23:] hands, such duties could be stretched and rationalized to cover practically any law, and we had better believe that said stretcher is going to use *his* veto power under the unanimity rule to block any constitutional reform that strips him of his "right" to engage in such justifications of his own power.
1.8.4. Any tool can be misused, however, and effort must go again to find the common sense of the matter, which is to find some individualist basis for saying there is an obligation to obey the laws. We cannot do so, strictly, but just as we have had to modify methodological individualism in order to come up with a conceptual contract, we might do so also for obligations to obey the laws enacted thereunder, provided, of course, that we do not get carried away. When we do get carried away, we arrive at whole-hog collectivism, or something barely distinguishable from it. One problem is that there is a range of conceptual contracts and for each contract various trajectories, each leading to a different set of laws enacted. There are, then, sets of sets of sets of possible laws under possible trajectories of possible conceptual contracts. It is a different thing to assert that an actual given law in question belongs to a set of sets of sets than to say it was at all likely to have been passed. Laws against murder? Very likely indeed. Special interest legislation? A certain amount of it, but wise contractors would try to minimize it. Prohibition? Hard to say, and remember the issue is not whether that specific law could ever have gotten unanimous consent but whether it could have been enacted under a unanimous constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment? If women belong to the polity, out of which a contract arises, it is hard to imagine an anarchist equilibrium that could lead to a social contract that incorporated blatant sexual discrimination. In *this* trajectory under the Constitution of 1789, however, the ERA has failed to go through for fear of judicial activism. And Prohibition might not have gone through had American history taken a different turn. (Recall that amendments and ordinary laws both are regarded here as enactments under a constitution.)
1.8.5. Assume we hold that Prohibition might (but by no means would) have arisen under at least one conceptual contract. We would then have shown that it was not a "bad" law, but this is far from saying it is a "good" law, or one that people are obliged to obey, as unambiguously as one ought to obey laws forbidding murder. If we actually had a social contract, Prohibition would be binding. We don't; we live under the illegal Constitution of 1789, which has been violated repeatedly; and so some sort [p. 24:] of judgment will have to be made whether Prohibition was railroaded through or whether it had nearly unanimous consent. We maintain the following principle: Without a social contract, or reasonable facsimile thereof, in actual operation, a much stiffer test has to be met before one can speak of a duty to obey a law than would be the case if the law in question were duly passed in accordance with one. I maintain that Prohibition, resisted by a huge minority, did not pass the stiffer test. [4]
1.8.7. In discussing the capital goods aspects of a stock of observed laws, Buchanan holds that its "benefits are yielded, in enhanced stability of interpersonal relationships, at an increasing rate over many periods of time. That is to say, the benefits from law increase in rate as the investment matures. It is as if, in the numerical example [of the previous paragraph], investment would yield the full 10 percent return only if the asset is maintained for, say, ten years, and that this rate might, say, increase to 20 percent if the asset should be maintained for twenty years." (LL 125) He adds that it is entirely possible that, once the public capital embodied in the legal-constitutional structure has been destroyed, it may be restorable "only over a period that exceeds personal planning horizons....For all practical purposes, public or social capital may be permanently lost once it is destroyed. It may be impossible to secure its replacement at least on the basis of rational decisions made by individuals." (LL 125-126) If so, "then a recognition of the capital or investment aspects of the genuine 'public goods' that are being destroyed makes corrective action much more urgent than any application of a consumption-goods paradigm might suggest." (LL 126)
1.8.8. Buchanan, evidently seeing this as a deteriorating era, is looking more at the erosion of public capital than at its enhancement, but one can take the opportunity to build upon his distinction between a capital stock that is characterized by an increasing rate of return over time versus stocks that are not so characterized, i.e., the ones public goods theorists usually, if implicitly, talk about. Buchanan seems on the verge [p. 25:] of converting this economic distinction into a moral one, which could read:
**It is optional whether a society provides for itself ordinary public goods, but its members OUGHT to provide for themselves public goods whose rates of return increase over time.**
1.8.9. I hasten to add that, as there may be several such public goods, the dividing line will not necessarily be between these and ordinary public goods but between increasing time-yield public goods and more increasing ones. It sounds difficult to avoid interpersonal comparisons of utility, but perhaps the constitution can be drawn up with the more increasing public goods at a higher level, just as amendments to the constitution rank higher than ordinary laws. It could be readily argued that freedom of discussion is very nearly at the highest level, that free speech is a public good that increases in its return to the capital stock of good constitutional order as fast or nearly as fast as any other. Besides, discussion is of the very essence of constitutionalism and cannot be inhibited if we are to pretend to be having any sort of (continuing) constitutional order in the first place. If we may speak of a natural right to participate in the social contract under the unanimity rule, we may (almost) equally speak of a natural right to free speech. Buchanan rejects natural rights, apparently, if an extended list is implied (especially if imposed from the outside), but he should accept at least two, continuing participation and discussion.
1.9.3. Yeager complains that contractarianism is all procedure and no content: "Rather than suppose that proper procedure exhausts the content of the good society, it would be more reasonable to emphasize proper procedure as an important part of that conception." Furthermore contractarianism is too value-neutral: "The very conception of a liberal society calls for distinguishing among the particular tastes and values of individuals, according more to some and less to others, regarding some as more and others as less worthy of being dignified by basing public policy on them."
1.9.4. Yeager's own view is that the aim of collective institutions is to encourage what he so well calls *social cooperation*, the market being the premier example of such an institution. He says that his own position is not so relativistic as Buchanan's, but neither does he wish an authoritarian regime run by people who think they have all the answers. Yeager calls his own position "fallibilism" and holds that certain moral truths may come to be known but that free and open discussion is needed for their pursuit. Contractarians really wish the same things he does, but his own position is free of their drawbacks.
1.9.5. I have voiced several of Yeager's objections earlier, and my resolution of the dilemmas has been to construe contractarianism as an ideal to be approached and also as a tool to be used in judging legislation. It does not seem that Yeager would prohibit any law that genuinely had completely universal approval, even if he thought the citizens would come to grief. This situation is, of course, hypothetical, but we have construed Buchanan's notion of a conceptual contract as a basis for judging that a given law *might* have been made under a constitution established by somewhat idealized men. Laws against murder are very different from the whims of a dictator or even special interest legislation, the merits of which are at best ambiguous. Some such legislation is inevitable, but it can be kept to tolerable levels. We have justified Buchanan's use of the word conceptual so that the set of [p. 27:] good laws (in the sense that the machinery for their establishment is approved) is not the empty set. Certainly the word can be so distorted as to rationalize everything, but so can every other word.
1.9.6. The charge that Buchanan's contractarianism glorifies the status quo involves a more subtle difficulty. It is one thing to contemplate idealized contractors in a state of nature cogitating upon a social order; it is something quite else to think about getting unanimous agreement to reform the present mess, especially as those on the take are far from idealistic and can be expected to block reform. It would seem that we are stuck with the present, unless we are willing to coerce some groups for the benefit of others. This need not be the case if the reforms are broad (Buchanan's "constitutional revolution"), however, as it can be argued that few if any are really ahead in the net with gains from a few privileges outweighing many losses elsewhere.(Getting people to realize this is another matter, but one of the jobs of *Professor* Buchanan is to educate!) Another way out is to hold that certain values are not to be included as appropriate for public policy, which is exactly what Yeager advocates. As already seen, Buchanan does seem willing to make strategic bargaining illegitimate, and other factors (e.g., envy) may well have to be excluded, on this Earth, to allow either a viable constitutional order or viable constitutional reform or revolution.
1.9.7. Buchanan seeks a high degree of generality and thus a correspondingly relatively relativist position on specific values. Yeager thinks moral truths, while not given to us by revelation, can be learned approximately and better and better as time goes on, much as scientific knowledge is gained in the non-moral realm. (Chapter 6 will discuss knowledge in social psychology, Chapter 5 the possibility of knowledge of natural rights.) Buchanan may think my own speculations about which social contracts will not work are premature, and more so Yeager's. At the same time, Buchanan would seem to be more enthusiastic than Yeager about different peoples experimenting with different social arrangements. A nation made up of those who are rugged individualists by temperament may very well be so jealous of their individual liberties as drastically to chain the constitution to disallow not only those public goods provided under another nation's constitution, but also those which, on their own preferences, they should appear to want. On the other hand, Yeager might protest a nation setting up a state that is "too large." (Federalism will be discussed in Chapter 6. I am not implying, incidentally, that either Buchanan or Yeager advocates forced imposition of his own conclusions upon [p. 28:] other peoples. The question of when one nation might liberate the oppressed peoples living under a far-from-unanimous dictatorial regime is a separate, and difficult, problem. I have no hints to offer here, and neither do Buchanan or Yeager.)
1.9.8. The difference between Buchanan and Yeager is not that one is all procedure, the other all content, but that each has a difference of emphasis, there being a greater agnosticism and recognition of differing regards for individual liberties over different nations on Buchanan's part. Both, it is fair to say, see free and open discussion as near essential to a free political order, and certainly neither is happy about the present. (Who is?) And both are quite aware of the compulsory nature of all past and existing states.
1.10.2. At each point in the discussion, we have noted inadequacies of strict [p. 29:] methodological individualism. Buchanan himself modifies his individualism by ruling out strategic bargaining at the constitutional level. Even in making this slight modification, he could be taken as making interpersonal comparisons of utility, since bargaining opportunities that are foregone are, strictly speaking, subjective opportunity costs. But I have gone further and claimed that in order to get any contract at all, a fictional New Contractarian Man has to be invoked and, it seems in places, endowed with virtues so splendid that few actually possess them. This could be a weakness as great as that of Lenin's New Socialist Man, and it remains to be explored whether there has been an evolution toward New Contractarian Man in actual human history. One also has to ask whether contractarianism is mandated by, or at least is tolerably consistent with, human nature. Both involve difficult questions.
1.10.3. A grave defect of this discussion of Buchanan's methodological individualism is that the concept is not clear. My arguments that methodological individualism needs to be modified may or may not apply to the precise claims and statements made in _The Limits of Liberty_, to Buchanan's own conception, or to the (varying) conceptions held by others. To quote _Limits_, page one again: "My approach is profoundly *individualistic*, in an ontological-methodological sense, although consistent adherence to this norm is almost as difficult as it is different." Buchanan is here contrasting his approach to the normative one that infuses political science, where an author *tells* (and not infrequently attempts to intimidate) the reader about what the political order should be like. Such arrogance Buchanan will not abide; for him it is up to the people themselves to come to their own agreements on what the political order should be. Perhaps Buchanan is too reticent when he says, again on page one of *Limits*: "I claim no rights to impose [my] preferences on others, even within the limits of persuasion," but the contrast he makes with the way political scientists usually operate is emphatic.
1.10.4. What is not so clear is whether those who parade their values openly reject methodological individualism, partially or totally, and in what respects. Buchanan is indeed different in the degree to which he strives to be objective, but perhaps many of his underlying premises are not so greatly at odds with those of conventional political scientists as they may appear. A man's biases are not impossible to fathom, though this has not been an easy nor an unquestionably successful task with respect to Limits, and men from the same culture, at odds with each other as they [p. 30:] often are, may share more in common than they disagree over. From a larger perspective, "there ain't a dime's worth of difference between 'em."
1.10.5. Let us, then, look for a larger perspective. We modern Westerners may all be methodological individualists, contractarians, constitutionalists, upholders of reason and science, to varying degrees and even (perhaps especially even) when in ostensible revolt. Searching for a larger perspective, I shall examine a book by a member of the Harvard Law School faculty, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, _Knowledge and Politics_,^ which was published in 1975, the same year as _The Limits of Liberty_. We might imagine we would want a book totally at odds with _Limits_, but that would be Zen Buddhist puzzles, shrieking, or silence (all about the same thing). Rather, Unger's book dissects the paradoxes of post-medieval thinking in the West, but the probably inevitable result is that his ultimate conclusions, after much fanfare and promise to go beyond modern thought, lie very safely within it. No matter, for one should learn what one can from books, and it is to _Knowledge and Politics_^ that we next turn.
2.1.4. The rejection of intelligible essences has implications for the psychology of the individual person. The individual is no longer seen as a particular representative of an essentialist human nature; rather, he is seen as a bundle of desires. If there were rhyme or reason to these desires being what they are, then reason could dictate which desires a person ought to have. But then we are back in the normative world of intelligible essences, with its judgmental comparisons of the actual with the essential. Desires, if we follow this line of reasoning, are purely arbitrary and should some men share similar desires, it is purely by coincidence. Reason, says the essentialist, can lead a man to his true desires; to the nominalist (or individualist in the sense used here), the role of reason is the purely instrumental or practical one of showing what it takes to satisfy these desires. But the laws of nature are the same for everyone, and so there is only one reason. Hence reason and desire are separate, just as separate as universal and particular. Men are individuals, with nothing else in common except an ability to reason about the means to ends and never about the ends themselves.
2.1.5. The line of reasoning in the above paragraph is somewhat specious, and it smacks more than a little of medieval scholasticism, as arguments using more than a few abstract nouns are prone to. Nor is this a good empirical argument based on the facts; in fact, men share far more values than random chance alone would imply. We primates share a number of biological and sociobiological needs, and most of us are conformists.
2.1.6. Unger draws a second analogy, that between the split of reason from desire in individualist psychology and a split between rules and values in individualist politics. Recall page one of _The Limits of Liberty_: "We live together because social organization provides the efficient means of achieving our individual objectives and not because society offers us a means of arriving at some transcendental common bliss." In other words, our individual objectives (particular values) can be anything at all, but we use rules, universally applied to all, to provide the minimally required social order for each to pursue his own objectives. Rules vs. values is the political counterpart of the metaphysical separation of universal and particular.
2.2.2. Buchanan thus assumes unawares, and in spite of the thrust of his other arguments, the radical separation of universal rules and particular values and thus agrees with Unger's characterization of individualism. (He also assumes that nations are territorial, and of course the entire book is atheistic.) It is hardly surprising that Buchanan should make generalizations from his own culture, and if it were pointed out that transcendental beings play a central role in Mohammedan law (Coulson 1968)^ or that that law covers only those who submit (which is what "Islam" means in English) and not those who dwell on a specific piece of real estate, Buchanan would not be moved to rewrite his book and at best would add a footnote. However, when he speaks of the necessity that laws be uniform, he is showing that he is an individualist in Unger's sense as well as one of the methodological variety. The three radical separations of individualism given by Unger (theory vs. fact, reason vs. desire, rules vs. values) do indeed hang together in some kind of analogizing reasoning, and we produce James M. Buchanan as Exhibit A in evidence. If these separations hang together for a careful thinker, trying hard to make distinctions, they must be tightly fused in the rest of us.
2.2.3. It is this hanging together that Unger calls the unity of individualist thought. In the last chapter we examined Buchanan's methodological individualism from its own standpoint and concluded that it was more applicable in a world inhabited by New Contractarian Man than in the world of today, but nevertheless the notion of a conceptual contract is highly useful--though also subject to abuse--in distinguishing a law that might have been passed under a constitution agreed upon by somewhat but not ridiculously exemplary men from a law that could only have been imposed coercively. We also argued that these exemplary contractors would most likely wind up discovering that a large measure of individualism in the natural rights sense was desirable, that it happens that men will best pursue their ends in a society where men are largely individually free. Here we tackle the problem of individualism as a world view in Unger's sense. (Note that a world view is held together neither by strict logic nor by empirical laws--Unger's order of ideas and order of events--but by analogous reasoning.) Buchanan is most clearly an individualist in the methodological sense, a good measure of an individualist in the sense of personal liberties, and also a post-medieval individualist in Unger's sense. I hoped I vindicated whatever personal libertarian sentiments Buchanan may have, though both I and Buchanan refrain from nailing down what the optimal amount of individual freedom is.
2.3.2. Practically any doctrine can be pushed to absurdity, and the reason is that the human brain is not very big. Our concepts never quite dovetail with reality and as we pile up deduction upon deduction, no matter how exact our arguments, we get carried away from reality at a geometric rate. Men are far better than other animals at making concepts, but they are also far more able to reify. The uniqueness of the West consists of a willingness by many, and an insistence by some, to put the deductions to the test and go back and refine the concepts. No other society, save the Classical, came even close, although today the rest of the world is rapidly imitating what has proven manifestly successful. The world might have droned on until the Sun died, with man being only a populous primate that managed to make a desert out of a huge part of the Earth's land surface.
2.3.3. It is meet to push the individualist world view to absurdity, for doing so brings to light mistaken directions which we willy-nilly follow. Unger entitled his book _Knowledge and Politics_ to emphasize that theory and practice go hand in hand as part of a world view held together by analogies and that neither theory nor practice can be changed alone. Let us follow Unger along his path, ask ourselves which of his conundrums we really want to get out of, crying out from time to time that no one ever meant for individualism to be taken that seriously (i.e., that absurdly), and learning what we can. Later, I shall present and criticize Unger's own proposed resolution of the paradoxes of individualism and his plan for the future. By way of anticipation, Unger does not revive intelligible essences, at least directly, and sees human nature as evolving and emerging over time. (As we shall see in Chapter 5, Ayn Rand subscribes to an essentialism, oś an epistemological sort.) This hardly conforms to the desire to define things exactly, but in a world of change this is not always possible. Alfred Marshall had a different idea of what economics was about than did Adam Smith, and Marshall's work itself changed the definition. On today's understanding, economics is decidedly less a moral enterprise than it was to either Marshall or Smith, but the economic approach has been extended to cover parts of politics and even sociobiology.
2.3.4. Unger also holds that the domination of some men over others inhibits the full expression of human nature. Buchanan, as we have seen, is professedly agnostic about human nature (LL 63) and its evolution, but we have argued that Buchanan implicitly holds a contractarian ideal and something of a hope that man is evolving toward it. Buchanan's value-free stance does not enable him directly to decry domination, which for him would be non-unanimous putative "contracts," but it is safe to say that he regards the coming together of men to make an agreement as something more than a theoretical tool of analysis. Men express their potential more fully when they act agreeably than when they resort to force.
2.3.5. Unger criticizes individualist doctrine on grounds of the untenability of the radical separations of universal and particular made in each of its three aspects: theory vs. fact, reason vs. desire, and rules vs. values. With respect to the first, if things lack intelligible essences, our words are at bottom names of arbitrary groupings of things. Our theories stand upon these arbitrary groupings and are therefore arbitrary themselves. If we take arbitrary not to mean provisional but randomly chaotic, then theory is completely separate from fact. This is in plain opposition to our merry optimism that science is progressive. In practice, we sneak intelligible essences in by the back door, and "it is not surprising, then, that language should become an obsession of the [individualist] thinker, for he worships it as the demiurge of the world." (KP 80) Moreover, he who has the power of making definitions has real power indeed (as Hobbes noted in _Leviathan_), as was also (we add) noted in a certain book that has had an appeal across a far wider spectrum of readers than Hobbes: [6]
2.3.6. The rejoinder to Unger's criticisms is that no one, or at least certainly no one today, espouses such an extreme nominalism. (But recall Unger's own strategy of pushing individualist ideas out to absurdity (KP 8)). In the realm of set theory we may speak of arbitrary sets with complete generality, [7] but when we deal with the factual sciences our concepts are partly if not largely controlled by the fact that they should be useful. Our theories in general, and their concepts in particular, are provisional and revisable, and both do get revised, in ever closer approximation to the facts. (The doctrine that concepts are true to the extent that they are useful as parts of true theories is the *pragmatism* of the great Charles Peirce.) [8] Thus, universal and particular are intertwined. Nevertheless, they are separate in accordance with pre-Peirce individualist doctrine and remain partly separate still, since one hopes it is the theories that get adjusted to the facts and not vice versa. (However, facts do not stand completely by themselves and are in fact interpreted and understood in the light of some theory or other. This intertwines theory and fact all the more. Examples come readily to mind: Interpretation of tracks in Wilson cloud chambers uses a great deal of physical theory, as the empirical investigation of the effects of minimum wage laws uses economic and statistical theory.)
2.4.2. Now, it could be argued that the number of general concepts needed to describe the world is infinite, but it is hard to see what sort of evidence (very indirect, as Bunge said to me in a letter) could support this view, and, infinite or not, science does succeed in reducing all the possible things to more manageable combinations of things. That the things of the world are clustered and not chaotic does not seem to be just an artifact of the human brain, though its limited size will mean a failure to make all the distinctions and refinements necessary, which fact we are reminded of every time science advances. Our brains, it might also be claimed, have a bureaucrat's preference for ordering reality into a hierarchy: In cosmology, it is planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so forth. But: There are arguments as to whether there are superclusters of clusters of galaxies (pretty much accepted) and super-duperclusters of superclusters (hotly debated). What is of extreme importance here is that such arguments today do not proceed by a priori reasoning but rather upon modern probability theory coupled with elaborate catalogs of observed galaxies. (The Greeks knew of a _galaxias kyklos_, "circle of milk," as early as the sixth century, B.C., but that this was a galaxy of stars, our Milky Way, was not established until Sir William Herschel mapped it with a telescope in 1785). [9]
2.4.3. Whatever reality is like, the individualism Unger describes asserts that theory and fact are entirely separate. Those living in individualist society make such a separation, Unger claims, because philosophy and life are intertwined. If our psychology and politics accord with individualist premises (i.e., reason and desire are separated as are rules and values), our views of theory and fact will also come to share this same radical separation. Unger may well be correct here, though we think the correlation is not 100%, but what is missing is a good, solid materialist explanation. (My reasons for adopting Bunge's materialist metaphysics, i.e., its compatibility with science, will be discussed in the next chapter.) It is not enough just to analogize one mode of separation with another.
2.4.4. Let us hazard an explanation in the way the brain is divided, being mindful that such an explanation is almost certainly only partly true but nevertheless illustrates that human behavior need not be mysterious. We begin by borrowing from Stuart J. Dimond's 1979 anthology chapter, "Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Vertebrate Brain."^ Dimond observes that animals tend to be symmetric along one of the two axes perpendicular to their line of motion. This is true also of the brain, but there are certain asymmetries, such as the heart being on one side, as well. In vertebrates with two eyes, the brain integrates the information from both eyes to form a three-dimensional picture. Dimond also argues that such animals' brain halves duplicate functions to a large extent and he observes that this excess capacity can be useful in case of accident. What he does not show is that this excess capacity is worth its cost in calories. In any case, there is a certain division of labor as well as duplication. Among other things, the integration of information from the eyes takes place on one side of the brain and not the other.
2.4.5. When we come to humans, we know from the work of Julian Jaynes (1976)^ and others that the left hemisphere of the cortex (in right-handed persons) is more concerned with fact and the right with patterns or theories. According to Jaynes, modern schizophrenics and pre-self-conscious men before the Greeks heard voices from the right side, which were often felt to be messages from the gods. With the coming of consciousness, men heard these voices less, but with a nostalgia remaining for the good old days when men did not have to think. Thought requires effort (free will!) to stimulate the feedback between the fact and theory sides.
2.4.6. On this view, the bifurcation of the cerebral cortex is (perhaps) the material basis for the bifurcation of our thoughts into theory and fact and, correspondingly, the splits between reason and desire and rules and values. Once one bifurcation gets going, so do the others, though we hardly understand the details. Why did these splits really get going--nay, get exaggerated--only after the Middle Ages? On the contrary, if Jaynes is correct that consciousness means the integration of the hemispheres, then these artificial (brain-artifactual) distinctions should be eroding.
2.4.7. In fact, the bifurcations made in the post-medieval West are less rigid than those made by earlier men with less integrated hemispheres. In the Middle Ages, the overwhelming bifurcation was between God and man. God was wholly transcendent, except for Jesus, and this was an important exception. In "heretical" Christianity, that is, the losing side (losing because it was too radically separatist for the emerging Western mentality), Jesus was wholly God and nowhere material (Jesus only pretended to suffer on the cross). Some of these Levantine throwbacks went so far as to claim Jehovah was but the demiurge, or sub-god, who created the foul material things of the Earth, while the true god sent his son to redeem the chosen of mankind to participate in the wholly separate realm of the spirit. (Pagels 1979)^
2.4.8. Individualism represents a big step forward, a secularization of transcendence in Unger's term (KP 161), though with lingering, even large, bifurcations still present. The Darwinian revolution, which is at bottom materialist and should do in the mind-body distinction, is still running its course. Even in our enlightened age we still have an America that is at least 80% Christian and more than enough spiritualists as well as mystics and irrationalists, even among physicists.
2.4.9. What is remarkable--and deserves careful neurological study, much of which will have to be speculative--is that Indo-European religions have always tended to be trinitarian rather than dualistic. (Dumézil 1959^) Furthermore, it is in the modern West that fiction (the novel) was added to truth and lies, the stranger to friend and enemy (Cuddihy 1976^^), not guilt