Worth reading throughout; I have some concerns about, say, the public intellectuals/ disciplinary normal science discussion, but I always learn from Shearmur.

Of BHL relevance:

3:AM: How does Hayek differ from public choice theory and how far do these approaches overlap?

JS: In the light of what I have said before, one should be able to see that their concerns were very different, although there was a good deal of sympathy between James Buchanan and Hayek. In his Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek comes close to invoking public choice concerns when he discusses some of the problems of political pluralism. In addition, I think that he would have stood in need of a more elaborate such approach, if he had tackled what I would see as a major problem facing his work; namely, how he would respond to what one might call a market-wise welfare liberal. Consider, here, figures like Raymond Plant and David Miller (the Nuffield political theorist, not the collaborator with Popper). They took seriously Hayek’s concerns about markets, prices etc. But they made the argument: you, Hayek, don’t rule out a welfare safety net, provided that it is constructed in ways which would be compatible with the operation of a market-based social order. Well, they might say, is this not equally compatible with our much more strongly redistributionist ideas, provided – as we wish – we take care that they would not damage a market-based social order? Hayek, as far as I know, did not address their work – he was, by the time that it came out, very elderly. But it would seem to me that, to do so, he would need to make use of a combination of moral argument (including about the likely consequences of the implementation of such a system) and public-choice style argument about the difficulties of making sure that such a system actually did what its proponents wished for – as opposed, rather, to providing ways in which educated people who did not particularly deserve assistance, got it.

However, there seems to me a problem about public choice theory. At a certain level, some of its key ideas seem to me really powerful. For example, that we should not presume that public policy is made by benevolent despots; that we should look to the systematic consequences of people pursuing their various interests within the political system, and so on. However, there seem to me major problems about how public choice theory (and rational choice theory) has developed.

First, there was the problem of people’s motivations. Buchanan argued, steadily, that we should treat people as self-interested. But it is clear that this does not work: there seems every reason to believe that people go into politics for a variety of motives, and no special reason to believe that they are motivated by narrow self-interest. On neither an explanatory level, nor when used for the purpose of normative analysis, does a commitment to pure self-interest seem telling. As critics of public choice theory have argued, while some behaviour seems to be illuminated by their approach, a lot does not. It is striking that Buchanan’s former collaborator, Geoffrey Brennan, has – with Loren Lomasky – written a book in which voting is looked at as expressive, rather than instrumental. The book is interesting. But it seems to involve adopting what had been a key theme stressed by the critics of rational choice theory, and to be a devastating departure from rational choice theory as a research programme.