The Calculus of Consent: A Compass for A Professional Journey
Richard E. Wagner
George Mason University
The Calculus of Consent, as well as its authors, has been with me from
the start of my professional journey which began at the University of Virginia in
fall 1963, as Wagner (2004) elaborates. Actually, it was The Calculus that led me
to Charlottesville. The preceding year I faced a quandary in applying to graduate
schools: I was attracted to the logic of economic analysis but I preferred the
material of political science. In discussing my quandary with Richard Bilas, who
had joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in fall 1962 from the
University of Virginia, he claimed that I could satisfy both desires by going to
Virginia. So I read The Calculus and realized he was right.
The correctness of that judgment was cemented my first week in
Charlottesville. One of my four classes was public finance, taught by Buchanan
who throughout the semester assigned a series of short essays to write, each of
which was discussed the next class session. At the end of the first class session,
Buchanan assigned an essay on “The Problem of Fiscal Dimension.” He
elaborated this assignment by saying that he had heard that if a fly were
multiplied nine times, it couldn’t fly and might even crumble under its own weight.
He continued by explaining that he thought the growth of government raised
some questions about fiscal dimension that we should think about. When I asked
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if he could clarify what he was looking for in this essay, he shot back that if he
could answer that question he wouldn’t ask us to write the essay!
Unknown to me at that time, that assignment along with Buchanan’s
response to my question have accompanied me throughout my academic career.
What proved to be that continuing presence, moreover, was reinforced the next
year when I took Tullock’s two-semester sequence titled something like “Theories
of Simple and Complex Agreement.” For both Buchanan and Tullock and
subsequently for me, a graduate classroom is not a forum where a professor
explains the contents of what has already been published. While students are
expected to read published work, the classroom itself is a forum for exploring and
articulating ideas that might secure future publication. My approach to graduate
instruction stems directly from the authors of The Calculus of Consent. But
instruction is just a method for dealing with content. The content of my work
likewise stems in significant measure from The Calculus in conjunction with my
classroom experiences with its authors.
It’s not that I take topics directly from The Calculus. It’s that The Calculus
reflects a scholarly orientation toward its material that recurs to me continually as
I pursue my scholarly work. In reflecting on that work, I can recognize how that
long ago confrontation with The Calculus and its authors established an
orientation that influenced the direction I have taken toward numerous particular
topics. Over the intervening 50 years, other ideas and scholarly formulations
have come into play that bring forward in fresh light themes that might have been
explored explicitly in The Calculus had those complementary formulations been
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around back then. In this brief note, I shall illustrate this point with respect to two
topics that have attracted my recent attention: the non-scalability of collective
processes and the injection of polycentricity into political economy.
1. Collective Action on Scale-free Networks
The problem of fiscal dimension that Buchanan raised in that first class
session has resurfaced in light of my recent interest in complexity, networks, and
scale-free models, ideas which are examined in Barabási (2002). For the most
part, economists treat their models as scalable, whereby the difference between
small and large entities is a simple matter of multiplication. There is good reason
to think that market settings are scalable. The market for fresh eggs, for instance,
operates in the same manner whether the size of that market contains a
thousand, a million, or a billion people. Sure, with larger numbers of people we
would expect to see more firms, different patterns of wholesaling and distribution,
and different numbers of producers, among other points of descriptive difference.
After all, the division of labor varies with the extent of the market. But we would
not expect basic propositions about how free competition tends to secure the full
exploitation of potential gains from trade to be affected.
This scalable property cannot be so reasonably carried over to collective
phenomena within democratic settings. It is private property that makes marketbased entities and relationships reasonably scalable. By becoming larger, a
market-based entity might lose some competitive advantage perhaps due to
difficulties associated with assembling and using distributed knowledge. If so,
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that entity will be reduced in size due to competition from smaller entities that are
able to make better use of distributed knowledge. What compels this outcome is
the operation of private property and freedom of contract and association, which
means that all commercial relationships must reflect mutual attraction between
willing participants.
Such scalability does not pertain directly to collective entities, due to the
ability of those entities to replace the necessity of attracting business with the
ability to compel business. A town of 10,000 people might have a town council of
ten people. At this scale, each member of the town council would represent
1,000 people. It is reasonable for such a person to know something about most if
not all of those persons. Included within that knowledge is a good deal of what is
but tacitly known and which plays out all the same in the public arena.
Furthermore, ten people can conduct their business pretty much informally, even
if they might also operate with regularly scheduled meetings.
It is not plausible to say that a city with one million people is just a town
multiplied by 100. If the city council still contains ten members, each of them will
now represent 100,000 people. It is impossible to know much if anything about
100,000 people. What little that can be known, moreover, will be explicit and
reducible to census-type forms; tacit knowledge will recede in significance. Only
a subset of citizens will have direct access to council members, and the pattern
of access will be systematic and not random: access will be the province of
people who represent significant interest groups and other positions of influence.
The surface view of a democratic form will conceal oligarchic modes of operation
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beneath the surface, as Robert Michels (1962) and Bertrand De Jouvenal (1961)
explain.
The size of the city council could, of course, be increased. If the council
were increased to 1,000 members, each member would represent 1,000 people,
as with the town. The relationship between population and council size would be
scalable in this instance, but the relationship among council members would not
be scalable. A council with ten members can operate informally and make use of
tacit knowledge because of the intimate knowledge they can have of one
another. With a council of 1,000 members, each member will be at most a
nodding acquaintance of the other members. The council will have to operate
with formal rules of procedure that limit access to the agenda of deliberation,
creating a different path to democratic oligarchy. As Vincent Ostrom (1987, 1997)
explains, democratic oligarchy is a natural tendency of a simple republic, the
avoidance of which requires some polycentric arrangement of republics, and with
the logic of Ostrom’s scholarship in this respect explored in Wagner (2005).
2. Polycentricity and Political Economy
Markets and politics are both competitive processes, but they operate to
different effect. Market relationships are scalable due to the voluntary nature of
social relationships crafted through private property. In contrast, political
relationships are not scalable outside of unanimity because compulsion gives
advantage to larger over smaller entities. The Calculus advanced a principle of
unanimity, under which political relationships would have been as scalable as
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market relationships. But The Calculus backed away from unanimity in light of
arguments about the high cost of taking collective action. It is, however,
unfortunate in my judgment that subsequent scholarship centered on the
qualified-majority formulation of The Calculus because that enervated the rich
constitutional framework with which The Calculus was wrestling.
While The Calculus gave much attention to voting rules, it did not reduce a
polity to a voting rule because voting rules represented merely the visible surface
of the constitutional iceberg. For a simple republic, a voting rule might provide
sufficient information for rendering political outcomes intelligible because a
simple republic is an organization which is susceptible to choice-theoretic
theorizing, perhaps as amended by considerations explored by theories of
agency. The actions of an organization can be plausibly reduced to acts of will,
as reflected by the median voter treatment of majority rule.
But the American constitutional order is compound and not simple. The
Calculus sought to uncover an economic logic that underpinned the complex
structure of the American constitutional framework. That framework was
polycentric and not monocentric. The products of polycentric polities are not
reasonably reducible to some median preference—any more than it is
reasonable to ascribe the mix of vegetarian and meat-based dishes served in
restaurants as reflecting some median preference. Polycentric polities are orders
and not organizations, and The Calculus sought to explore the market-like
character of the American constitutional order, as illustrated by its forays into
vote trading and bicameralism.
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Votes would occur at many places within a polycentric polity, but votes
stand only at the end of various parliamentary processes. The Calculus points
toward entanglement as a framework for political economy, as illustrated by
Wagner (2007, 2012). Jane Jacobs (1992) describes societies as characterized
by interaction among carriers of commercial and guardian activities. While her
distinction between commercial and guardian does not map perfectly into the
distinction between markets and polities, the mapping is reasonably informative
all the same. Jacobs was concerned with the problems that could arise from
excessive commingling among carriers of the two types of activity. The Calculus
pointed in the direction of articulating the characteristics of what could be
described as an openly competitive system of political economy. Within such an
openly competitive system, it could plausibly be claimed that the various
boundaries between market and state, including the many entities that reside
inside each of those constructions, supports a broadly liberal order of free and
responsible persons.
Within the institutional logic of openly competitive systems, particular
entities expand or contract depending on their ability to compete with other
entities in their efforts to attract business. The Calculus explained that the
founding logic of the American republic was animated by some such notion. It is
also clear that the institutional framework of the American constitutional order
has moved significantly in the direction of democratic oligarchy over the past
century or so. The Calculus shined a bright light on the difficult problem of
establishing and securing a constitution of liberty, a difficulty that has surely been
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intensified by the surging progressivist forces that seek relentlessly to achieve a
constitution of servility through transforming a compound republic into a simple
republic. The relentless quality of this progressivist challenge surely provides
ample recognition that eternal vigilance is truly the price of liberty. No book and
no pair of authors can be held responsible for the course of liberty within a
society; all the same, The Calculus and its authors have provided splendid tools
for continuing the unending quest to live within a constitution of liberty.
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References
Barabási, A-L. 2002. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA:
Perseus.
Buchanan, J. M. and G. Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
De Jouvenal, B . 1961. “The Chairman’s Problem.” American Political Science
Review 55: 368-72.
Jacobs, J. 1992. Systems of Survival. New York: Random House.
Michels, R. 1962. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical
Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Collier Books.
Ostrom, V. 1987. The Political Theory of a Compound Republic, 2nd ed. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Ostrom, V. 1997. The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Societies:
A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Wagner, R. E. 2004. “Public Choice as an Academic Enterprise: Charlottesville,
Blacksburg, and Fairfax Retrospectively Viewed.” American Journal of
Economics and Sociology 63: 55-74.
Wagner, R. E. 2005. “Self-Governance, Polycentrism, and Federalism: Recurring
Themes in Vincent Ostrom’s Scholarly Oeuvre.” Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization 57: 173-88.
Wagner, R. E. 2007. Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance.
Cheltanham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Wagner, R. E. 2012. Deficits, Debt, and Democracy: Wrestling with Tragedy on
the Fiscal Commons. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
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