[note 1] Buchanan's various projects and writings may be understood as an ambitious program of social and cultural reform based on the insight that many crucial problems arise from the uncritical use of symbolism.
For the rest of his career, Buchanan pondered ways to mitigate the variety of threats to humanity that he perceived in the unmanaged and unsupervised growth of modern science and technology.
After serving in the Navy during the final year of World War I, he studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar between 1919 and 1921.
It was there that Buchanan met Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon, and the three of them conceived an ambitious program for reviving American education and democracy through mass training in the traditional liberal arts by means of the Socratic method and the Great Books curriculum.
In 1948 Buchanan worked actively in the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, and for several years afterwards was consultant, trustee, and secretary of the Foundation for World Government.
In 1957 Buchanan accepted an invitation by Robert Maynard Hutchins to become a senior fellow at Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal political think tank in Santa Barbara, California.