The creative community within public choice analysis arose out of the establishment of what has become known as the “Virginia School of Political Economy” in the 1960s and 1970s. These efforts were reinforced through the move by Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) to build a department...

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the...

Henry Sidgwick's loss of religious faith is central to understanding the origins of the Cambridge school of welfare economics. The most prominent “public” manifestation of this loss and its impact on Sidgwick's thought was his Methods of Ethics, which was at once the capstone work of...

Public choice is one of the few examples of a “creative community” emerging from within the professional academic structures of economics in the postwar period. This article examines the early development of the public choice movement at the University of Virginia and how this movement both...