Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" -- because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others -- and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...

A substantial and diverse literature in economics traces its intellectual roots to Charles Tiebout's 1956 article, "The Pure Theory of Local Expenditure." Its present recognition frequently attributed to originating the idea of "voting with your feet," however, contrasts sharply with its...

This paper discusses why mathematical economists of the early Cold War period favored formal-axiomatic over behavioral choice theories. One reason was that formal-axiomatic theories allowed mathematical economists to improve the conceptual and theoretical foundations of economics and thereby to...

There has been a division of labor in the “behavioral sciences”. This is perhaps most striking in two of the largest behavioral disciplines, economics and psychology. Since 1990, a number of economists have crossed this boundary. But James Buchanan was one of the first economists to take the...

Though the social choice of social institutions or social results is impossible there is, strictly speaking, no social choice individual evaluations of social institutions or results trivially are possible. Such individual evaluations can be deemed liberal either because they emphasize political...

This chapter argues that the ambiguous bifurcation in Frank Knight's understanding of economics would manifest itself through the divergent paths in the earlier writings of his students Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. It argues that despite Friedman's stature in the scientific elite of the...

The task of the economist, from an Austrian perspective, is twofold: (1) to render economic phenomena intelligible in terms of purposive human action, and (2) to trace out the unintended consequences, both desirable and undesirable, of human actions. When analyzing political exchange, the...

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...

Was 1986 Nobel Laureate James Buchanan an intellectual heir of South Carolina slavery apologist and political thinker John C. Calhoun? Further, was Buchanan's worldview shaped by segregationist Nashville Agrarian poet Donald Davidson? These are claims made by historian Nancy MacLean in her 2017...