|Peter Boettke|
This time last year was the last opportunity I had to hear Jim Buchanan speak, and I thought of the experience as a privilege -- just as I had the first time I ever saw him talk in 1984 as a student. To me, a kid who fell in love with economics by reading Ludwig von Mises and absorbing the Mises mythology through GCC and FEE, Buchanan was the closest I ever came to directly studying with a Mises-like figure. I would eventually outgrow such intellectual sentiments, but only partially if truth be told when it came to Buchanan. He personally would have been turned off by the comparison to Mises and by the implied hero-worship as opposed to the rough and tumble of serious intellectual jousting. But alas please excuse the folly of my youth. Buchanan to me remains a towering figure -- who even in the areas I disagree with him on, asked better questions than his contemporaries, and thought longer and harder about what an acceptable answer might look like than anyone else I have read on the topics he covered. His intellectual legacy should motivate a new generation of economists and political economists to probe deeply into questions of a methodological, analytical, and ideological nature.
For classical liberal political economists, I would argue, the second half of the 20th century was defined by the work of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan (Knight, Mises and Hayek defined the first half of the century). Each had their own battle with the hegemonic Keynesian paradigm in economics and politics, and each had their intellectual victories against great odds. Though all three would win the Nobel Prize for their work in economic science, Hayek and Buchanan were more philosophical than Friedman, and thus have a legitimate claim to have contributed to social philosophy in a significant way as well as positive political economy.
In the 1950s, along with G. Warren Nutter, Buchanan founded The Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia. As Buchanan wrote in describing the purpose of the center: "The Thomas Jefferson Center strives to carry on the honorable tradition of 'political economy' -- that study of what makes for a 'good society.' Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discussions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed econoimc policy measures."
This upcoming weekend the 2013 Public Choice Outreach Seminar will meet again. Much of the material presented will be positive political economy --- discussing analytical and empirical results in the literature. However, on Saturday night, I will talk about the contributions of the Ostroms (Lin and Vincent) and their relationship to Buchanan's project. I am very much looking forward to this opportunity.
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