|Peter Boettke|
Today marks the beginning of an exciting 3 days of celebrating and critically examining the contributions of James M. Buchanan to the field of economics, political economy and in particular to spontaneous order studies.
The gentleman behind FSSO is Richard Cornuelle. Dick was Mises's research assistant in the mid to late 1940s. Dick obviously took from Mises his passion for classical liberalism, but what really attracted him intellectually was the idea of "praxeology". Not praxeology as an epistemological doctrine, but praxeology as the universal application of methodological individualism to study all human endeavors. Cornuelle in his own work focused on rational choice analysis in non-market decision settings, such as philanthropy (what he called the independent sector) and to the internal organization of firms (where he addressed de-managing). But Cornuelle while pursuing an intellectual career, did not pursue a strictly speaking academic career. Instead, he worked for FEE, he worked for the Volker Fund, he worked in policy, he worked in the corporate world, and he worked in philanthropy. It was at FEE that he and his brother Herb introduced Murray Rothbard to the writings of Ludwig von Mises. And it was at the Volker Fund that Dick was a program officer that helped secure funding for the development of the Law and Economics program at Chicago, including the Journal of Law and Economics, the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy at University of Virginia, the Volker Fund lecture programs that lead not only to Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, and Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, but helped cultivate a generation of young economists and social thinkers to pursue a methodologically individualistic research program across the social and policy sciences. Volker Fund conference participants included not just Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, but Jim Buchanan, Henry Manne, Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, etc., etc. The real history of the Volker Fund and its importance in post WWII development of the counter-revolution to the Keynesian hegemony has yet to be written. I don't mean the ideological/policy counter-revoultion that has recently been emphasized in the work of Phil Mirowski, I mean the methodological and analytical counter-revolution that led to the expansion of the rational choice paradigm and the development of property rights economics, public choice, law and economics, New economic history, New Institutional Economics, and market process economics. This counter-revolution was about the persistent and consistent application of the methods most developed in economics to areas of research beyond the analysis of the market economy proper. Jim Buchanan was at the center of that pursuit of methodological individualism across the human sciences.
To bring recognition to individuals who have in fact championed the praxeological paradigm as understood in this way, and who in their work have improved our understanding of spontaneous order, The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Order (FSSO) was established. The 3 individuals involved in FSSO besides Dick Cornuelle are Bill Dennis, Leonard Liggio and myself. The previous lifetime achievement award winners have been Vincent and Elinor Ostrom (2004), Gordon Tullock (2007), and Peter Berger (2009). The symposia on these awards were published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; Public Choice; and Society, respectively.
The 2010 award goes to James Buchanan. The conference to honor Jim and his contributions starts today September 9th and will run through the weekend. We will kick things off this afternoon at 4:00pm at GMU's new conference center and hotel, The Mason Inn at 4:00pm with a panel discussion of Jim's work chaired by Henry Manne, and including remarks by Amartya Sen, and Elinor Ostrom. This will be followed by the award ceremony and then a reception. This is open to the public.
Starting tomorrow morning, the conference will be closed and limited just to the conference invitees. But the papers that will be discussed are as follows:
Discussion Leader: Geoffrey Brennan (ANU)
Session 1
"Teaching Economics, Appreciating Spontaneous Order, and Economics as a Public Science", Peter Boettke (GMU)
"Buchanan as Philosophical Economist," Hartmut Kliemt (Franfrut)
Session 2
"Buchanan on Externalities," Alain Marciano (Reims)
"Political Psychology and the Future of Public Choice," Michael Munger (Duke)
Session 3
"Government, Clubs, and Constitutions," Peter Leeson (GMU)
"Thinking About Constitutions," Georg Vanberg (UNC)
Session 4
"Empirical Constitutional Economics," Stefan Voigt (Hamburg)
"The Pathologies of the State," Tim Besley (LSE)
Session 5
"Constitutions and Crisis," Chris Coyne (GMU)
"Do We Need a Distinct Monetary Constitution?", Steve Horwitz (SLU)
Session 6
"Doing Away with Discrimination and Domination," Karen Horn (Berlin)
Should be a great few days of conversation on economics and political economy. As Jim Buchanan always emphasizes --- "onward and upward".
Comments