James Buchanan

In one of the major publishing endeavors of recent decades, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, the Nobel laureate in Economics in 1986, is being published in twenty volumes under the auspices of The Liberty Fund. The series will include ten monographs and all of the important journal articles, papers, and essays that Buchanan has produced in a distinguished career spanning more than a half-century. The monographs will appear in a new form and with the addition of indexes in those cases where no index or only a partial index was originally provided. In addition, each volume includes a foreword by one of the series' three editors, Professors Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Robert D Tollison, each of whom is a distinguished economist in his own right. This is a series that no serious scholar of public choice theory, public economics, or contemporary political theory will want to be without. It is a series that will also appeal to the general student of liberty, for Buchanan has, perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar, helped us to view politics without the romantic gloss that characterizes so much normative political theory and that slips unthinkingly into so much popular commentary. Buchanan has been a resolute defender of 'the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals,' and has been a painstaking analyst of the institutional structure that might best support such a society. Buchanan stands with von Mises, Hayek, Popper, and Friedman as one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty."

Constitutional political economy is the theme of the papers collected in this volume. This entire area of contemporary economic thought is a legacy of James M Buchanan. In outlining the importance of this volume to the contemporary study of economics and to the work of James M Buchanan, Robert D Tollison states in his foreword, "Buchanan literally founded the field of constitutional political economy... (His) insistence on the importance of rules was an important innovation in economics, and, over the past thirty years or so, the analytical and empirical relevance of Buchanan's constitutional perspective has become apparent." The thirty-five papers represented in this volume are grouped into these major subject categories: foundational issues; the method of constitutional economics; incentives and constitutional choice; constitutional order; market order; distributional issues; fiscal and monetary constitutions; reform. For Buchanan, his work in constitutional political economy is just the first step. He is concerned with inducing economists and other scholars to take the constitutional problem seriously. As they do, says Robert D Tollison, "the face of modern economics will be changed."