Collected Works of James M Buchanan, 20 volume set

by James M. Buchanan

This monumental twenty-volume series presents the writings of James M. Buchanan, one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty. Buchanan, the Nobel laureate in Economics in 1986, has much wisdom to offer not just to economists and academics but to all who seek to understand the challenges and opportunities of governance in our age. "This is a series," write the editors, "that no serious scholar of public choice theory, public economics, or contemporary political theory will want to be without. It has perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar helped us to view politics without the romantic gloss that characterizes much normative political theory and that slips unthinkingly into so much popular commentary. Buchanan has been a resolute defender of 'the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals' and has been a painstaking analyst of the institutional structure that might best support such a society. Buchanan stands with von Mises, Hayek, Popper, and Friedman as one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty.' The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan is a vast and significant twenty-volume series that includes ten monographs and all of the important journal articles, papers, and essays that Buchanan has produced in a distinguished career spanning more than half a century. Among the monographs are such famous works as The Calculus of Consent (coauthored by Gordon Tullock) and The Limits of Liberty, as well as such gems as Cost and An Inquiry in Economic Theory. The monographs have been cast into a new format, and in those cases in which no index, or only a partial index, was originally provided, new indexes have been created. In addition, each volume includes a foreword by one of the three editors of the series, each of whom is a distinguished economist in his own right. Volume 20 presents a comprehensive index to the entire series and an annotated copy of the entire curriculum vitae, indicating in which volume in the series the various items appear and, correspondingly, those items that have been omitted. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan is an important contribution to the study of an important economist and a scholar of liberty, a man who has always been able to view his work from an appropriate perspective. As James Buchanan has written, "My interest in understanding how the economics interaction process works has always been instrumental to the more inclusive purpose of understanding how we can learn to live with one another without engaging in Hobbesian war and without sacrificing ourselves to the dictates of the state." James M. Buchanan is an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and is considered one of the greatest scholars of liberty of the twentieth century. He is also Professor Emeritus at George Mason and Virginia Tech Universities. Gordon Tullock is Professor Emeritus of Law at George Mason University, where he was Distinguished Research Fellow in the Center for Study of Public Choice and University Professor of Law and Economics. He also taught at the University of South Carolina, the University of Virginia, Rice University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Arizona. In 1966 he founded the journal that became Public Choice and remained its editor until 1990.

7154 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

American economist known for his work on public choice theory, for which in 1986 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' self-interest and non-economic forces affect government economic policy. He was a Member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, and professor at George Mason University.
Buchanan was the founder of a new Virginia school of political economy. He taught at the University of Virginia—where he founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression—UCLA, Florida State University, the University of Tennessee, and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where he founded the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC). In 1983 a conflict with Economics Department head Daniel M. Orr came to a head and Buchanan took the CSPC to its new home at George Mason University. In 1988 Buchanan returned to Hawaii for the first time since the War and gave a series of lectures later published by the University Press. In 2001 Buchanan received an honorary doctoral degree from Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, for his contribution to economics.