This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...

Most people think of science and literature as distinct human endeavours. According to received convention, science is mostly about "mind", whereas literature is largely about "heart". Science, goes the argument, is by and large rational, literature primarily emotional. Science is about...

The bulk of James Buchanan's contributions to political economy occupy 20 volumes in Liberty Fund's collection of his works. Reading those works shows both that Buchanan injected new strands of thought into that tradition and that his oeuvre contains points of apparent incoherence. To speak of a...

To what extent is a prevalent social order that is constructed upon the freedom of the individual impacted by decisions taken in the domain of positive economics? How does the Hobbesian reductionist view of the state of nature correlate to the Kantian view of self-ruled individualism expressed...

This paper examines James Steuart's explanation of the emergence of the exchange economy. An initial hypothesis holds the decisive influence of a plan designed and implemented by merchants. Our proposal evokes the importance, acknowledged by Steuart, of the construction of institutions,...

In spite of the manifold critique about the state of economics in the aftermath of the financial crisis, an even increasing presence of economists and economic experts can be observed in the public sphere during the last years. On the one hand this reflects the still dominant position of...

In classical and Marxian political economy economic advancement takes place in stages of development. These stages are characterized by different functional distributions of income. In this paper we show that the Cobb-Douglas Production Function is the only production function which has the...