When hard heads collide: a philosopher encounters public choice

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2004 by Loren E. Lomasky

I

Introduction

IN THE 1970s POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY HAD BEGUN TO ENJOY a renaissance among tough-minded analytical philosophers who previously had scorned it as second cousin to preaching and propagandizing. In part this reinvigoration was a response to real-world events. Civil rights aspirations that had somehow metamorphosed into riots and assassinations, the bottomless quagmire in Southeast Asia, university campuses on the brink of anarchy or just past it: these rather insistently placed calls on the resources of philosophy that went beyond inquiries into subtleties of language and logic. The timing could not have been more propitious for the appearance in 1971 of John Rawls's magisterial A Theory of Justice. Combining comprehensiveness of vision with impeccable rigor, it restored in a stroke the grand tradition of political theorizing. And with the appearance three years later of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia the other shoe dropped. Brash and bold, almost indecently clever in method and style, Anarchy, State and Utopia had the chutzpah to defend a classical liberalism that most philosophers had believed interred a century previous with the bones of Herbert Spencer. Liberal theory, in both its libertarian and egalitarian-welfarist guises, was assertively alive and well. Its analytical credentials were undeniably mainstream, and the apparatus utilized by Rawls and Nozick was, to a considerable extent, borrowed from economics. A philosopher simply couldn't play the game absent some basic facility with indifference curves, Edgeworth boxes, prisoners' dilemmas, maximin rational choice strategy, and related esoterica that had infiltrated the discussion.

In late summer 1982 I came to Blacksburg to take up a sabbatical year residency at the Public Choice Center. I brought with me to Blacksburg some of that renewed interest in political philosophy. As far back as I held any political views at all I was an instinctive Millian liberal. When Barry Goldwater told America that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," I was among the minority of citizens unreservedly convinced. But these enthusiasms remained purely avocational throughout my formal training. It was not until I carried my newly-minted Ph.D. to Minnesota that I began seriously to take up the project of trying to understand what basic rights are, who has them, and why. I hoped that a year of uninterrupted study at the Public Choice Center would boost me along in that inquiry. That expectation was both well grounded and flagrantly off base. Neither before nor afterward have I enjoyed a period of such sustained intellectual stimulation. But the idea that I would be uninterrupted as I went about my business was quickly proved false. Among the dividends provided by the Public Choice Center, solitude to plow one's own furrow was distinctly absent. Ideas were thick in the air there, and even had I wanted to push them to one side so as to be unimpeded in pursuit of my own tasks, I would have needed more powers of self-isolation than I possessed. Like Oscar Wilde, I found myself able to resist anything but temptation. My fate, however, was more fortunate than Wilde's. Instead of incarceration in Reading Gaol, I found myself the willing prisoner of numerous conversations in Center offices and over lunches at Pizza Hut and Daddy's Money. (Could a more serendipitously named restaurant have ever served a community of distinguished economists?) The rights theory project was largely put on hold during the year, but it eventually reemerged sporting less flab and more muscle. (1) And by then it was accompanied by a complementary investigation of the workings of democratic institutions. These two areas of inquiry remain at the center of my professional work, and so I carry with me a substantial chunk of Blacksburg and the Public Choice Center.

I am an enthusiastic dabbler around the edges of the discipline, but, unlike other contributors to the Blacksburg symposium, I lack the competencies and credentials of a public choice theorist. So it would be presumptuous of me to attempt, as it were, to offer assessments from the inside. The following observations are, then, presented in the first instance as autobiographical reflections. If any can be usefully generalized, all the better. In any event, they are a record of one man's education.

Section II discusses the Center's working environment, Section III its personnel insofar as I enjoyed opportunities to interact with them. How these conveyed lessons in the practice of philosophy is taken up in IV. The sine qua non of economic theory is the exchange of quids for quos, and so in the spirit of reciprocity Section V suggests some lessons that public choice might draw from philosophy.

II

Public Choice Center: Environment

DIRECTLY CONDUCIVE TO INTELLECTUAL LABOR WAS THE BUILDING'S LAYOUT. Offices opened into public areas, and in the course of getting a cup of coffee or handing a manuscript to a secretary (back in the era before personal computers), one would routinely encounter one's colleagues. The ethos was robustly open door. An idea, a query, a qualm: these would pass frictionlessly from one locus to another, returning to their source strengthened and vivified. That the building was a single-purpose facility enhanced the intensity of communication; one took for granted that those who shared one's space also shared one's project, or one complementary to it. Unlike philosophers, economists routinely practice joint authorship. Interacting in the comfort of this open environment was likely to be the opening gambit for such a collaboration. Or it might prompt the paper after next.