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Public Choice (2007) 131:249251 DOI 10.1007/s11127-006-9038-8
BOOK REVIEW
James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005. vii + 111 pages. USD 45.00 (cloth).
Robert Lawson
C Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2006James Buchanan should perhaps have titled this collection Why I Am, and What It Means to be a Classical Liberal. The actual title of course reects F. A. Hayeks famous essay Why I am not a conservative published in The Constitution of Liberty in 1960. Buchanan goes beyond the simple and familiar distinction between conservatives, who favor the status quo, and classical liberals, who favor liberty. He postulates a view that classical liberals see human beings as being natural equals while conservatives see humans as naturally unequal. To classical liberals, like Adam Smith, people are natural equals, obviously not in all dimensions, but in the sense that we have equal rights to act in a system of natural liberty. We are equally capable of carrying out our lives as we see t. Conservatives, like Plato, insist that some are more equal than others; that is, there is a natural hierarchy among people in society. Many people are not capable of carrying out their lives effectively without some measure of authority to constrain bad behaviors and encourage good behaviors. Classical liberals are natural small-d democrats while conservatives must be skeptical of democracy with its premise of political equality.
An interesting follow-up to this analysis is Buchanans discussion of the tensions between classical liberalism and modern liberalism. He argues that like conservatives, modern liberals implicitly accept the view that people are natural unequals. It is this very natural inequality among various economic and social classes that motivates modern liberalism. To be sure, the policy prescriptions that derive from this view are very different. Conservatives believe public policy should take our natural inequalities as a given, even embrace them, and use the power...