The origins of Buchanan's views on federalism, Chicago 1946–1947

Abstract

Buchanan's first writings about federalism and fiscal justice were “'Federalism’: One Barrier to Labor Mobility” and “A Theory of Financial Balance in a Federal State,” two term papers that he wrote before his dissertation and that have never been discussed before. Studying them allows us to complete the recent literature on the origins of Buchanan's fiscal federalism. We show that most of Buchanan's ideas about fiscal equity were already in these works, and also that Buchanan made other claims and used other arguments – about mobility, for instance – that were absent from the dissertation but remained important to him for a long time. We also analyze these essays in the context in which Buchanan was at that time, namely the economics department of the University of Chicago. We show how Buchanan fed on, not to say was influenced by, the courses for which he wrote these essays. This allows us to shed new light on the role Theodore Schultz, D. Gale Johnson, Henry Simons, and Roy Blough, played at the beginning of Buchanan's career.

Transatlantic Roads to Mont Pèlerin: “Old Chicago” and Freiburg in a World of Disintegrating Orders

“…Living in such a context, further research into the insights generated by the "finde-siècle generation" may well be worthwhile, and that not only for the discourses within history of economics or within academia broadly speaking. As proclaimed by James Buchanan, a student of "Old Chicago" in 1940s (Johnson 2014;Marciano 2020) and an admirer of Freiburg later in his life (Vanberg 2014;Kolev 2018b), the final addressee of politico-economic research is the citizen, so that "the task for the constitutional political economist is to assist individuals, as citizens who ultimately control their own social order" (Buchanan 1987, 250). Exploring an age of fragile orders and its theorists like these who lived through the 1930s and 1940s has the potential to illustrate to today's citizen how history of economics can produce illuminating, topical narratives of the artisanship of orders (Ostrom 1980).…”

Buchanan, Popular Myths, and the Social Responsibility of Economists

“…Buchanan was interested in how economists could promote values that actually meant, to him, promoting the values of liberalism and, in particular, freedom. The defense of freedom had been in Knight's presidential address and in much of his work, as well as in Simons—to cite two of the economists who influenced Buchanan (see Marciano ). It was, however, the first time the latter made that point so formally.…”

Exchanges with and without the sword: slavery, politics-as-exchange and freedom in James M. Buchanan's institutional economics

“…As one of Buchanan's co-authors, Roger Congleton (2014: 54), wrote, ‘If even slavery is conceptually compatible with [Buchanan's] contractarianism’, then it would seem within his theory no social state can ‘be considered illegitimate’. Slavery might also be considered a salient example given Nancy MacLean's (2017) claims that Buchanan advanced a covert racist agenda, although the credibility of MacLean's work has been significantly diminished by subsequent scholarship (Farrant, 2019; Farrant and Tarko, 2019; Magness, 2020; Magness et al ., 2019; Marciano, 2020; Munger, 2018a).…”