James Buchanan

Published originally in 1975, "The Limits of Liberty" made James Buchanan's name more widely known than ever before among political philosophers and theorists and established Buchanan, along with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, as one of the three new contractarians, standing on the shoulders of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. While "The Limits of Liberty" is strongly related to Buchanan's "Calculus of Consent", it is logically prior to the Calculus, according to Helmut Kliemt in the foreword, even though it was published later. Buchanan frames the central idea most cogently in the opening of his preface: "Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a society of men and women who want to be free but who recognise the inherent limits that social interdependence places on them".

Commenting on his collaboration with Geoffrey Brennan on THE POWER TO TAX, James M. Buchanan says that the book is "demonstrable proof of the value of genuine research collaboration across national-cultural boundaries." Buchanan goes on to say that "THE POWER TO TAX is informed by a single idea -- the implications of a revenue-maximizing government." Originally published in 1980, THE POWER TO TAX was a much-needed answer to the tax revolts sweeping across the United States. It was a much-needed answer as well in the academic circles of tax theory, where orthodox public finance models were clearly inadequate to the needs at hand. The public-choice approach to taxation which Buchanan had earlier elaborated stood in direct opposition to public-finance orthodoxy. What Buchanan and Brennan constructed in THE POWER TO TAX was a middle ground between the two. As Brennan writes in the foreword, "The underlying motivating question was simple: Why not borrow the motivational assumptions standard in public-choice theory and put them together with assumptions about policy-maker discretion taken from public-finance orthodoxy?" The result was a controversial book -- and a much misunderstood one as well. Looking back twenty years later, Brennan feels confirmed in the rightness of the theories he and Buchanan espoused, particularly in their unity with the public-choice tradition: "The insistence on motivational symmetry is a characteristic feature of the public choice approach, and it is in this dimension that THE POWER TO TAX and the orthodox public- finance approach diverge."

While relatively short, COST AND CHOICE, according to Hartmut Kliemt in the foreword, "holds quite a central place in Buchanan's work. For the fundamental economic notion of 'cost', or 'opportunity cost', is intimately related to the individualist and subjectivist perspective that is so essential to the Buchanan enterprise." To be sure, the Austrian school of economists enunciated similar views of cost decades before Buchanan, but Buchanan advances his theories by attempting to integrate his views into the orthodox classical and neoclassical framework. When he published the book in 1969, Buchanan hoped that other scholars would follow him in researching the opportunity-cost concept and its applications. Unlike the theatre of public policy, where Buchanan's work is widely celebrated and influential, his important work on the issue of cost and choice, so clearly explicated in this volume, has done little to move the mainstream of economic thinking in the thirty years since its original publication. It is hoped that this new edition of Buchanan's seminal work will place Buchanan's groundbreaking ideas in wider circulation. Buchanan writes in the preface, "My aim is to utilise the theory of opportunity cost to demonstrate basic methodological distinctions that are often overlooked and to show that a consistent usage of this theory clarifies important areas of disagreement on policy issues."

Public-goods theory constituted a major element in James M Buchanan's research agenda throughout the 1960s. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is a major part of that work. At the time that Buchanan was elaborating on his theories of public goods, the prevailing trend in public economics was the emergence of public-expenditure theory, which attempted to form a comprehensive theory of the state around the notion of market failure. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS established Buchanan's broad purpose of explicitly comparing market performance with political performance. As such, the book is an important part of Buchanan's contractarian theory of the 'productive state'. Conceived originally as a series of lectures given at Cambridge University in 1961 and 1962, THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is written for students, but is in no way a textbook of dry pedagogy. Instead, as Geoffrey Brennan writes in the foreword, "What Buchanan provides here is a clear statement of the contractarian approach to public goods problems, very much in the 'voluntary exchange' tradition of Wicksell and Lindhal."

Public-goods theory constituted a major element in James M Buchanan's research agenda throughout the 1960s. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is a major part of that work. At the time that Buchanan was elaborating on his theories of public goods, the prevailing trend in public economics was the emergence of public-expenditure theory, which attempted to form a comprehensive theory of the state around the notion of market failure. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS established Buchanan's broad purpose of explicitly comparing market performance with political performance. As such, the book is an important part of Buchanan's contractarian theory of the 'productive state'. Conceived originally as a series of lectures given at Cambridge University in 1961 and 1962, THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is written for students, but is in no way a textbook of dry pedagogy. Instead, as Geoffrey Brennan writes in the foreword, "What Buchanan provides here is a clear statement of the contractarian approach to public goods problems, very much in the 'voluntary exchange' tradition of Wicksell and Lindhal."

Biotechnology marks a new scientific revolution. It holds the promise of generating resources to meet our needs in the fight against hunger, disease and environmental disasters.

Interconnection bandwidth and transmission line effects can profoundly influence signal and power integrity. This text shows how to ensure signal integrity and control noise in the design of high speed digital systems.

This volume is a collection of sixteen essays on three general topics: the methodology of economics, the applicability of economic reasoning to political science and other social sciences, and the relevance of economics as moral philosophy. Several essays are published here for the first time, including: Professor Alchian on Economic Method; Natural and Artifactual Man, and; Public Choice and Ideology. This book provides relatively easy access to a wide range of work by a moral and legal philosopher, a welfare economist who has consistently defended the primacy of the contractarian ethic, a public finance theorist, and a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice. Buchanan's work has spawned a methodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think about government and government activity. As a measure of recognition for his significant contribution, Dr Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics.