Institutional Failure

Buchanan experienced student revolt at first hand in the 1960s, both at the LSE in 1967 and at UCLA (where a bomb exploded in the Economics Department) in 1968. Believing as he does that ‘ingrained in Western tradition is a sense of respect for the rights of others, including property rights’,1 he was bound to regard the ‘intolerance’ of those troubled years as a serious threat to that tradition and to recognise in the ‘chaos’, the ‘trespass’, the ‘violence’, the ‘social and political vandalism’, the ‘terrorist tactics’, the ‘class, race, and national hatred’2 of those bad times nothing less than the embryo of the Hobbesian state of nature. Even so, Buchanan was quick to commit sociology in public and to declare that ‘student activism is the result, rather than the cause, of social discontent’.3 Student activism, Buchanan insisted, was more than an isolated and an ad hoc instance of spontaneous combustion. Rather, it was a sensitive social indicator of a deteriorating moral climate characterised by the ‘now pervasive attitude which allows anarchist departures from constitutional procedures so long as the ‘cause is good’:4 The student protest movement is to a large extent an expression of the social and political extremism with which we have increasingly come to live everywhere else in society. Much of it flows from the rapidly spreading taste for (and rising returns in) terror and myth-making, best developed among those addicted to a disregard of lawful conventions as a means of protest against the intrinsic nature of constitutional government.5