We argue that in order to answer the challenges that James Buchanan put to contemporary political economists, a reconstruction of public choice theory building on the work of Buchanan, F.A. Hayek and Vincent Ostrom must take place. Absent such a reconstruction, and the significant challenges...

Classical Political Economy is characterized by the systemic study of economic forces. Primarily concerned with the dynamics of economic growth, the classical economists sought to explain how and why wealth is created and destroyed. Their study found the role of institutions central in answering...

Attempting to find the technically optimal monetary policy is futile if the Federal Reserve's independence is undermined by political influences. F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan each sought ways to improve the performance of the Federal Reserve. They each ended up rejecting the...

Is everything good in political economy incorporated into modern economic theory? With the transition of the art of political economy into the science of economics, there was a significant synthesis of the graduate education curriculum. The prevailing technique in economics, a neoclassical...

Early efforts to tame man’s passions going back to antiquity focused on the repression of those passions. As the political and social sciences emerged, the argumentative focus shifted from repressing to harnessing man's passions. This is what produced the discovery of the "invisible hand"...