This is a preliminary draft of the third 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 contrasts two approaches to working with the compound noun “political economy.” The standard,...

We argue James M. Buchanan's scholarship provides us an exemplary model for doing liberal political economy. Levy (2014) argues there are irreconcilable tensions within liberalism between rationalism and pluralism. Buchanan navigates these tensions in a way that powered one of the most important...

This article--designed to give readers unfamiliar with public choice a historical overview and flavor for the kinds of problems considered--is divided into three main sections, "historical origins," the "modern founders of MPE," and a brief description of some "current issues" studied by public...

My essay, in a time of (political) economic crisis, re-examines the fate of the constitutive oxymoron that is political economy from Montchrétien through neoliberalism. Its hero is Adam Smith, who at the end of Book I of Wealth of Nations warns of the destructive consequences of...

This paper provides an overview of Buchanan's constitutional political economy, as it emerged over the course of fifty years. This was the field in which James Buchanan devoted the most effort and to which he made the largest contributions. Although the finely grained arguments that he developed...