James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy: A Rational Reconstruction
42 Pages Posted: 20 Feb 2017
Date Written: February 18, 2017
Abstract
This paper presents the preface and first chapter of my book on James M. Buchanan, which should be out in late 2017, published by Lexington. This chapter introduces Buchanan to those who don’t know him, or who know him only in terms of individual pieces of work they have encountered. I portray Buchanan as a hedgehog of a thinker, to recur to Isiah Berlin’s well-known essay on Tolstoy. Looking backward from the end of his life, Buchanan appears as a massive oak tree casting shade over numerous areas of inquiry, and with all that shade flowing from a single sapling planted 64 years before his death when he published his first paper. Chapters 2-7 unfold as a book within the book, where I pursue the logic of my rational reconstruction. References to citations do not appear because all references for the book are collected as a single file and placed at the end of the book.
Keywords: public choice; constitutional political economy; Virginia political economy; Frank Knight; Knut Wicksell; Antonio de Viti de Marco; Gordon Tullock
JEL Classification: D62, D70, H41, P16
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation