Overview

James M. Buchanan, Nobel Laureate in Economics and one of the premier political economists of the 20th century, was at the heart of the emergence of public choice theory and the reintroduction of politics to academic economic analysis. Like any great and productive scholar, his body of work includes tensions, flaws, and inconsistencies that must be confronted by scholars looking to engage, critique, and advance his distinctive project in political economy. Buchanan's work is important but also open for contestation and improvement. Buchanan's Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of James M. Buchanan presents a critical assessment of Buchanan's research and ideas. The contributions to this edited volume, which include original chapters by several of Buchanan's coauthors and students, identify sources of tension within his writing. The book's key takeaway is that the research program Buchanan developed continues as an open-ended project, both as a social scientific approach and as a classical liberal political vision of constitutional order, rather than a static dogma or fruitless dead end. Taken as a whole, this volume identifies important questions and areas for future research by the next generation of constitutional political economists.

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9781942951414

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Reviews

Philosophers see imperatives; a tension between imperatives is a 'contradiction.' Economists see goals; tensions among goals are 'trade-offs.' James Buchanan, as an economist writing philosophy, can be hard to understand. This marvelous book immediately becomes the single essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Buchanan's enormous contributions and his equally significant failures. --MICHAEL C. MUNGER, professor of political science, economics, and public policy, Duke University; author of Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Scholars have attended to Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's economics and public choice theory. Until now, they have given too little attention to Buchanan's political philosophy. Boettke and Stein have edited an important, engaging, and highly readable book on this topic. --BARRY R. WEINGAST, Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; coauthor with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009) A new Tensions in Political Economy series begins by engaging the extraordinarily broad sweep of Buchanan's thought, stressing the primacy he assigned to individuals in collective choice processes and situating his work in the context of the 20th century's scholarly milieu and the ever-expanding state to which orthodoxy gave rise. --WILLIAM F. SHUGHART II, J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University; editor-in-chief of Public Choice Buchanan's Tensions, edited by Peter J. Boettke and Solomon Stein offers an informative and timely contribution to the scholarly literature on James M. Buchanan. Contributors celebrate Buchanan's legacy by exposing solvable and irreconcilable tensions in Buchanan's copious writings. --S. M. AMADAE, research affiliate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; author of Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Author Information

Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University and director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Solomon Stein is a research fellow in the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

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