So I mean, we already kind of started, but The Limits of Liberty, how does this fit within everything else he's written and where does it situate itself? So you explained a little bit of what he's thinking about, but what did he have to think about before to even get to that question, and why are those the two things he's chosen to, I guess figure out the tradeoff between if we want to talk about it in terms of economics to weigh these two things that societies do think about, why not liberty and happiness, why not order and cleanliness?

So one of the things that you can find on the Econlib website is the review of Buchanan's 1962 book, the reviewer's Pierre Lemieux, and let you mentions The Limits of Liberty as being Buchanan's Follow up to that earlier 1962 book called The Calculus of Consent. And it's in this book co-authored with Gordon Tullock that they lay out this sort of two stage conceptual stage way of thinking about constitutions and politics. And that's also where they introduce their analysis of a unanimity rule, and they ultimately use the unanimity rule as a way to assign a higher priority to certain decisions in collective action compared to others. And the rules of the game generally falling in those sort of higher priority categories. And so that on say where that might matter to the 1970s America would be how have the, excuse me, what's the electoral margin required for a constitutional amendment compared to what's the margin of victory required for a piece of legislation?

And so at that time, we were talking about Nixon and the tumultuous times where there was quite a bit of tension between the Congress and the President, and there were sort of open battles for power along Pennsylvania Avenue, which culminated in 1974's Congressional Budget Act, which among other things concentrated more of the budget power on the side of Congress as opposed to with the president. And so this checks and balances featured is one of the ways that, and starting in the calculus of consent that Buchanan explored the needs for limited government, this sort of checks and balances, that is a very liberal, classical liberal idea. And that Buchanan himself will sort of say that he's really working with [James] Madison's dilemma, how to achieve a government that's powerful enough to protect individual's rights but not powerful enough to become an infringer upon those rights. So Buchanan would say he's really tackling that basic fundamental question. It starts with the coauthored book in 62, Calculus of Consent, and then in The Limits of Liberty I think is where he is putting many of the pieces together and giving it, tagging a second lap around the track to get his thoughts together. Right on it.

Is there any significance to the fact that he did it without Tullock?

There probably is. They reached a point where they maybe drifted in their relationship, their professional relationship, and some of that had to do with the way that each of them respectively looked back at The Calculus Consent and with a critical eye of, well, how could we have done things better or differently? And [Tullock’s] counterpart is to write a book called The Social Dilemma, where he really explores some of the things that he maybe felt were not adequately done in the 62 book. And Buchanan comes to The Limits of Liberty. I think that they did something that is historic and groundbreaking and has created a legacy of scholarship. But there's lots of things that I don't know about that story of their collaborations, but there was definitely a point at which they went effectively, kind of their separate ways.

Yeah, I just thought it was interesting because The Calculus of Consent, it's such a big deal, especially in public choice, and I don't know, I mean obviously they're a pretty powerful duo, but I guess they do diverge, and it's just kind of interesting to think about because usually at least upon introduction to public choice, you think it kind stops there, but it keeps going. I guess they keep thinking you can't stop a thinker from thinking. So what's interesting about this, especially as we've kind of built up this idea of Buchanan as an intellectual, is someone who really has a direction that he thinks economics should go, an end that he thinks economics is kind of made for and what he thinks economists need to be focusing on. And the fact that he's been doing that basically his whole career, but also that he's kind of well placed to actually, even though he thinks liberty is important to say that there are limits in a way that I don't know if other economists would be, it's not to say they can't, but he stands in a unique position to write a book like this. So what are the limits of liberty in his estimation? Are there, what are they?

Yeah, I mean that is the title of the book, so it should be made clear. So one way to go about it is to sort of look at the early part of the book and how he gets things started and then sort of connect it to the later report of the book where he talks about what reform steps are possible and how can we best anticipate how they would work out given his framework. At the outset of the book, Buchanan lays out his conceptual sequence for how people come out of a state of nature, and he kind of stays close to Hobbes on this where the state of nature would be the famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and shorts. And Buchanan says, how would people come out of that?

He says, property rights have maybe been overestimated in this conceptual process to the neglect of contract. And here's what he says. He says, people in the state of nature are going to be expending resources trying to get the stuff they need and also trying to protect the stuff they have. So because there's no rules against things like theft, fraud, there's no recourse in a state of nature for any of that. So you have to invest in protecting yourself against it yourself. And so each person would have an attraction to this alternative way of doing things, let's everybody agree not to attack each other and steal stuff.

And then some other things, we're going to voluntarily agree to circumscribe our own behavior. We're going to give up some of our liberty, and that's because each of us is going to be made better off for having done so specifically because we don't have to invest all these resources into being good attackers of and protectors of property. So instead, let's all sign a contract, and then underneath the terms of that contract, we'll go about our daily business. So that's his emergence from the state of nature argument. So that might ring some bells where some connection points for you to understand the nature thinkers.

It's kind of interesting because maybe I'm just misunderstanding [Thomas] Hobbes, but Hobbes rubs me as an elitist a little bit. I mean, I guess when he's like, this is how we get out of it, and maybe Buchanan that by saying that it is more contractual and by saying that we do agree to give up these things, what's kind of interesting.

Yeah, it doesn't want,

Just to briefly fill that in, I think it's a good insight and it's because Buchanan doesn't want there to be monarchy or autocracy or organism. This is where the influence of Knut Wicksell comes in because Buchanan's very preoccupied with the tyranny of the minority and is therefore using the Hobbes and his version of the state of nature as a reference point, but sort of stopping there and saying, we don't want the Hobbesian solution. We would like a constitutional republic solution. So how best could that get worked out?

So this is kind of interesting. I don't know if I misunderstand the way that a lot of political theorists, especially the actual people that academics end up reading and studying and all this [John] Locke and them, how they kind of tell this story. I know with Locke, you're mixing your labor with the land and that makes property and whatever, but it seems as though even if you can kind think that property is an inherent thing, that we have the right to that actually in this narrative, when you're emerging from this kind of Hobbesian state of nature, we're agreeing to it, true. But it seems like at least in the other state, there was nothing necessarily raw. I don't even want to go so far as to say that because I don't know, but it almost seems as though it is more, and I guess this is really what's the crux of the whole thing. And what's complicated is that you're giving up liberty for liberty. There are certain freedoms you have to forego in order to actually have not only prosperity, not only order, but actually to have more options. And that's kind of a weird thing, and I don't know if that's the right interpretation of what's going on, but it seems to differ a bit from the typical account.

And this is where the sort of two stage framework helps, I think the giving up of liberty that should not be under Buchanan's rules, rules, something that can be an exchange in the sort of post constitutional stage of things. That should be something that is done at the constitutional stage or reform stage. So what that does is it rules out something like in the War on Terror context, for example, the liberty versus security trade off. That's its own conversation of course, but it does kind of show where Buchanan might draw the line and he might object and counter argue against the liberty and security trade off regardless of the merits of it. So do we actually gain more security when we give up liberty regardless of that, he would argue that it doesn't belong in the post constitutional stage and that I think he is a little bit distinctly in the way he treats it.

So this idea of kind of saying, okay, once there's a constitution we're done, it kind of brings us closer to where we are today. We do have a constitution in America and in lots of places, but what do you do? And I always struggle with this when we are born into the post-constitutional stage, especially if we're the big really important decisions, you kind of, I mean, go back to The Calculus of Consent and think about the ways that we decide on things as a society. I was not born when we were in the pre constitutional stage. Neither were you. Neither in a way. Luckily none of us today were because our lives are better, but also because I don't really want to have had to make that decision.

I think that there's a couple of ways that we, I don't want to say get out of that so much as both recognize it and deal with it. And the first is that well look at these constitutional stage rules as something that a person would approve of. And against the unanimity requirement, you say that most people, all people would look at these rules and say, yes, those are probably good ones for us to get along under. And the other thing that is very, very important for Buchanan and for understanding where he's coming from on this question is that the importance of the status quo. And he always says, we start from where we are, we start from here. And so what that means is that the specific context of time and place where a constitutional reform might be considered and undertaken that by definition will be that decision by definition will be the product of people who were born at the time when it was happening, the ones doing it. So that status quo element is very important for, it's one of those things that sticks with his work almost throughout his career. 

I'm trying to think of what we can learn from this. So something that's really inspiring to me about Buchanan that's just super striking, and you mentioned it in a way that's not so clearly at the forefront of other thinker's minds so consistently is, I mean, you can see it through his commitment to methodological individualism, but it is this true fundamental belief in the fundamental equality of human beings. Obviously there are other people who think of that sort of stuff, but there's no economist, I think I could say pretty confidently that exhibits this sort of intentionality towards this principle, even if they believe it. It has been throughout everything that he has produced, it seems to be always there. And so how do we…

Yeah he wears it on sleeve. It does. He wears it on sleeve.

Yeah. So how do we learn from that and from what he wrote in Limits of Liberty as we kind of people in a society, as economists, as classical liberals, what do we make of not just this work, but this work is representative of everything he stood for, but also this work in itself?

I'm drawn to a passage now with your question that I've shared a couple of times recently. After talking with people at a conference or whatnot, I'll come back to his passage and I'll say, you should read this. And both it harnesses everything you just said about his constant priority on the individual, but it does so here in a way that reinforces the responsibility side of the coin, not just the liberty side. And it also is in the context of rip forming, right? So if you look around at the United States in 2025, and there's an argument whether there is a constitutional crisis happening in our current, and there's a president responds in an interview that he's not sure if it's his responsibility to uphold the constitution.

There's a lot of clamoring and outcry whenever a utterances like these come out of Donald Trump. But ultimately, and this is where it Buchanan would sort of sit up in his chair and remind people of, we're a society of self-governed, at least in the fundamental characteristics of our political institutions. We are a self-governed people. And in fact, you often will hear the Trump administration invoking what the people voted him in to do as part of the justification for the steps that they're taking. So what do we make of this? Certainly as people we're concerned with what's happening in our federal government. And that's true if you agree wholeheartedly with the Trump administration or disagree wholeheartedly, certainly for classical liberals, this is not how we would draw up a president or a presidency starting with tariffs and you name it,

Hashtag Grover Cleveland is my president.

Yeah, I've got some favorites myself, and probably Cleveland is among them, but that this is not a liberal order from how classical liberals understand things. So what do we make of it? I want to suggest that Buchanan gets us to think about Donald Trump as a symptom more so than as a disease. You can clear about us having constitutional disorder. And he also gives us the tools to think about how that really is a reflection of what's happening at the individual level. And so the passage, let me just take a minute, not a minute, a second to read it. This is from late in the book. He says, when we speak of controlling leviathan, we should be referring to controlling self-government, not some instrument manipulated by the decisions of others in ourselves. Widespread acknowledgement of this simple truth might work wonders if men should cease and desist from their talk about and their search for evil men and commence, instead to look at the institutions manned by ordinary people, wide avenues for genuine social reform might appear. And so ultimately he, and this is a constant news work too. He wants to desperately avoid being a council of despair and this is his reaction or this is his response to it. If we can change the mindset, it's just changing our mindset about the economy from mechanical to organic.

If we can change our mindset about what's happening and say, first of all, there's some self accountability here, and secondly, our leader is more symptom and disease. And thirdly, looking at it this way actually opens up some avenue for meaningful. I think he means constitutional stage types of reforms

Because then there's stuff you can do about it.

You can do about it. Yeah.

Ah, that's so optimistic for once. That's great, isn't it?

Yeah.

I am thoroughly impressed with his consistency. I mean, again, just at all levels, this commitment is just so present. And I don't know. It's inspiring, but also it really, I mean, he embodies in a lot of ways what we say we want to be as classical liberals, that we are optimistic, and he's sitting here offering ways to think that are actively solving even the problem before we know what the problem is. It is. Great. Well, thank you so much for, I don't know, introducing us to this and kind of…

I hope it was helpful. Yeah.

Juliette Sellgren (43:57)

I have one last question for you, because we ended on such a nice note here that I'm feeling pretty good. I'm ready to take on the world. But what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on? Why?

Well, there's so many ways. I would love to answer this. I would love to answer it 10 times, but I'd give you 10 different interesting answers. Maybe I'm a Bayesian in that sense because I keep updating, but I'll give you one that Buchanan actually, and I spent a good bit of time talking about, I was a grad student in the mid-nineties before he retired, and he got interested in my dissertation topic, which was on congressional term limits. And for lots of the reasons we talked about it already, you can see why he might be interested in that. It's a constitutional stage reform.

He also was really interested in the efficacy of it. So term limits supporters were out there touting it as a solution for all kinds of political elements, including fiscal policy. If we turn 'em over more, they won't spend as much. There'll be more like a citizen legislature. All kinds of benefits would come from it. There'd be more diversity and representation and stuff like that. Now, I think I came to the topic, kind of that mindset, wow, this is a pretty cool way of structuring the incentives of elected officials. But the more and more I dug into it, and actually the more I talked to again about it on a few occasions when we did, the more I began to realize, well, none of that stuff looks like it would actually happen or it would work out that way in practice. And in fact, when you look at the state legislatures, when you have about half of them enacting or tightening term limits of their respective legislatures back in the nineties, interestingly, it was those states that did enact state legislative term limits that had a larger increases of spending of state level spending. So put term limits in the actually spending goes up. And my read on that is that you change the time horizon for being an elector office in such a way that it gives elected officials the incentive to spend now as opposed to sort of hang out and wait until they develop some political capital and then influence spending later. So yeah, I would say term limits. That's the one thing my mind on.

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at greatantidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.