UNANIMITY VS. UNANIMOUS AGREEMENT TO TERMS
The idea that agreement to terms is motivationally irrelevant is so radical for liberalism that even Buchanan only suggests it in a mixed and inconsistent fashion. Following his work with Gordon Tullock in Calculus of Consent, Buchanan defends a contractarian approach to liberalism reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s idea that the fundamental role of government should be to fulfill each individual’s direct interest in procuring security.[479] Even though he rejects the idea that agreement to terms mobilizes compliance, he still hopes to identify principles of government that would achieve the virtually unanimous assent of all citizens.
Given Buchanan’s repudiation of the significance of agreement to terms, and his staunch conclusion that the sword will be necessary to maintain order even after an accord is reached, it is mystifying that there could be any vital role left for agreement to play in his social order.Buchanan’s crucial though residual reliance on agreement typifies a deep tension within neoliberal political theory. Even if we accept that morals and norms have been reduced in status to private preferences and expected utility rankings, achieving unanimous agreement on a policy still seems a secure basis on which to organize collective action. Buchanan looks to agreement in the form of unanimity to provide a rationale for his Leviathan. Many theorists who attempt to come to terms with the corrosive Prisoner’s Dilemma appeal to the unanimous agreement of agents that mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection.[480] Here, agreement signifies aligned preferences: all prefer mutual cooperation to mutual defection, or CC>DD for every actor. The unanimity principle therefore suggests that government is warranted in applying the threat of sanctions on potential defectors.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma approach to rationalizing governance delineated by Buchanan ingeniously separates the achievement of unanimous agreement from the precise terms that actors acquiesce to.
This strategy allows him to isolate two distinct premises: (1) that unanimity is well defined and serves as a meaningful basis for political coordination and (2) that it is possible to categorically distinguish between agreement that exchange is mutually beneficial on the one hand, and agreement over the exact terms of exchange on the other. Unanimity is promoted as a principle legitimating governance while agreement over the precise terms of distribution is deemed superfluous to motivating individual or collective action. It is not evident that the two premises can be simultaneously intelligible. This tension becomes evident when we recall that part of the original value of the market as an institution derived from the fact that it evolved through the unanimous assent of its participants. This idea is explicitly rendered in Thomas Hobbes’s third law of nature, discussed in Chapter 5, “Hobbesian Anarchy.” This assent is inseparable from the agreement to specific, voluntarily accepted terms of exchange. Although it seems absurd to isolate the motivational force of unanimous agreement from the content of the agreement itself so as to conclude that any agreement is favorable to none, this is exactly what Buchanan does. Any enforceable agreement negotiated by credible threats may be characterized as consensual. Therefore, and more importantly, such reasoning provides justification for levying sanctions against any defector from an exchange regardless of whether or not the terms of exchange themselves were voluntarily agreed to.Buchanan justifies the constitutional state on the grounds that everyone prefers some government to the state of no government typified by Hobbes’s unenviable state of nature. As in the ultimatum game wherein one actor chooses a distribution of a reward, offering the remainder to the other person, and if the second decision maker accepts the offer, then any division of the total resource bundle is unanimously assented to. His dovetailing of general agreement with realism about human nature only comes together at the price of viewing property rights as de facto as opposed to normatively regulative.
This is because many divisions of spoils could result depending on the disagreement threat point of what outcome obtains in the case that no settlement is reached by the agents. Instead of a normative default point characterized by mutual respect and recognition of each person’s right to exist without being harmed, each actor is free to exercise credible threats predicated on harm to obtain a more favorable personal outcome. Buchanan hopes to secure private property by stipulating that only unanimous consent can serve as a condition for relinquishing it. However, if agreement to specific terms of a transaction has no motivational content, and therefore no intrinsic import, then it follows that the practice of property rights is only secure insofar as coercion is employed to defend that system. The Achilles’ heel of Buchanan’s defense of property rights, which otherwise seems attractive for ostensibly relying on the unanimity principle, is that it ultimately creates a situation wherein the individual with the greatest force will be able to set the terms of exchange and interaction.[481] The less desperate actors are, and the more resources they have to fall back on in case a mutually agreeable outcome remains out of reach, the better the likelihood that they will be able to offer meager terms to their interaction partners. These actors can hold out longer for an agreement and have a better chance to extract terms to their advantage, although occasionally actors who under these circumstances have no guaranteed right to subsist could threaten extreme violent behavior as a tactic to improve their distribution.