Abstract
Despite affection for his former teacher, James M. Buchanan’s work ran counter to that of Frank H. Knight. Knight disagreed with Buchanan’s methodological, economic, ethical, and political assumptions. He rejected methodological individualism, the underlying methodological commitment of Buchanan’s research program. While Knight remained within the standard constrained maximization framework of neoclassical economics, Buchanan adopted a catallactic perspective. Ethically, Knight argued that all ethical judgments must remain open to debate, and also rejected the de gustibus non est disputandum assumption that went hand-in-hand among economists with methodological individualism. And philosophically, Knight’s theory of democratic politics was centered on “democracy as discussion” rather than choice, contract, and constitution. Why, then, did Buchanan return again and again to Knight’s work? After a survey of his published criticisms of Knight, the conclusion emerges that engagement with Knight pushed Buchanan toward a more open-ended political economy.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a fourth essay in which Buchanan evaluates Knight’s work (Buchanan 1976), but the essay does not tell us much about Buchanan ’s own evaluation of Knight. Instead, the essay asks how the differences between Knight’s views and those of his friend Clarence Ayres on methodology and ethics in economics would translate into criticisms of 1970s-style economics.
- 2.
- 3.
Originally from Vienna, Polanyi had ended up in the United Kingdom during the interwar years. In the aftermath of World War II, Polanyi’s participation in the Mont Pelerin Society led several of its members to seek ways to bring him to the United States. The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought was a logical place for him (as it was for F. A. Hayek , also from Vienna via the U.K.), but he was only allowed to visit occasionally because of his previous political activities in Europe. Knight was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought, but was not involved in it during the latter part of the 1940s.
- 4.
The labels moralism and scientism emerged from Knight’s mid-1940s attempts to characterize the difference between the social philosophies of John Dewey (scientism ) and Robert Hutchins (moralism) (see Knight 1982).
- 5.
Buchanan (1967, p. 309) recognizes that Polanyi’s framing of democracy as truth-seeking is not distorted if we say that “he conceives discovery in the political-social realm as the revelation of God’s design.” Buchanan is certainly right to add that, “In relatively sharp contrast, Knight remains highly dubious about God, and he is unwilling to go beyond man’s own competence to judge on the basis of his own criteria.”
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Emmett, R.B. (2018). Why James Buchanan Kept Frank Knight’s Picture on His Wall Despite Fundamental Disagreements on Economics, Ethics, and Politics. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_50
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