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What Should (Knightian) Economists Do? James M. Buchanan's 1980 Visit to Chile
Author(s) -
Farrant Andrew
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/soej.12323
Subject(s) - dictatorship , democracy , constitution , government (linguistics) , scholarship , sociology , knightian uncertainty , political science , political economy , law , law and economics , philosophy , politics , linguistics , ambiguity
Although Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger became involved with Pinochet's Chile in the mid‐1970s, an increasingly influential body of scholarship argues that James M. Buchanan was similarly eager to provide Pinochet's dictatorship with advice. Buchanan reportedly had a heavy influence on the development of Chile's 1980 Constitution and similarly helped to design Chile's binomial electoral system. Buchanan's seeming willingness to advise Pinochet's dictatorship provides a stark contrast to his longstanding advocacy of Frank Knight's view that democracy is “government by discussion” and Buchanan's oft‐repeated insistence that democratic consensus trumps economic expertise. This article draws upon a wealth of largely ignored archival evidence and Chilean primary source material to engage and evaluate whether Buchanan—a Knightian economist par excellence—abandoned his advocacy of “government by discussion” and provided early 1980s advice that helped Pinochet's regime of “institutionalized terror” (Valdes [Valdes, Juan Gabriel, 1995], p. 30) design a constitution that would chain any subsequent Chilean democracy.