Immortality: The Meaning of Buchanan’s Life

An Econlib article by Peter Boettke on “Virginia Political Economy: James Buchanan’s Journey” shows how political philosophy and economics were enmeshed in Buchanan’s work. It also reminded me of an interesting two-part video of an interview of Buchanan by Geoffrey Brennan. The two economists often worked together and were notably co-authors of The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy (1985), which provides a summary of the contractarian and constitutional construction that is central to their work. (This classic book is available online; I recently reviewed it for Econlib.)

The video gives a less technical and more conversational overview of the work of Buchanan, who died in 2013. At the very end of the two-hour conversation, Buchanan disserts on what he believes, à la Albert Camus, is the ultimate absurdity of life, except for one sort of consideration. He confesses a departure from methodological individualism as if death and the meaning of life (or at least of his life) require an exception. I wish the whole conversation were transcribed, if only because a Southern accent is not exactly a French accent. In my own transcription of that passage below, the ellipses indicate conversational hesitations, details, or simply words that I could not identify; Buchanan continues about life:

The whole thing may be absurd. What is it all about? … Why is it that I am interested in what’s going to happen when I am no longer around. In my case, it can’t be genetic because I don’t have any children. … But yet then I am intensely interested in that. … It seems to me that—and this does get me a bit away from the methodological individualism … we, or at least I, feel like I am a kind of member of a kind of a tribe, what we might call a tribe that is a continuing tribe, it doesn’t die … it may die, but it does not necessarily die, but it does beyond my mortality, it’s kind of a tribe that would called, described as the spirit of liberty or the spirit of classical liberalism. And it seems to me as a participant in that game … furthering those ideas … and I live as long as those ideas live in a way. I am just a part of a stream and in a sense that stream is moving on. Now it takes people to keep pushing and keep motivating that stream, or else the stream can die, it’s not necessarily immortal. On the other hand, it transcends human life … it provides meaning to ordinary life. … It seems to me the spirit of liberalism, the spirit of classical liberalism, or the spirit of liberty if you want, can be a kind of justification that sort of gets you away form this ultimate absurdity in a way.

There are great mysteries in the universe that lie much beyond political philosophy. But whether life is meaningful or absurd, whether eternal life exists or not, it is always the individual who experiences life or death. “Tho’ there is a God or not,” sang poet Leonard Cohen.

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