Description: "Buchanan's Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of James M. Buchanan," a collection of eight original scholarly essays, presents a critical assessment of Buchanan's research and ideas.
Brief description: Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University and director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Review Quotes:
"Philosophers see imperatives; a tension between imperatives is a 'contradiction.' Economists see goals; tensions among goals are 'trade-offs.' James Buchanan, as an economist writing philosophy, can be hard to understand. This marvelous book immediately becomes the single essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Buchanan's enormous contributions and his equally significant failures."
--MICHAEL C. MUNGER, professor of political science, economics, and public policy, Duke University; author of Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
"Scholars have attended to Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's economics and public choice theory. Until now, they have given too little attention to Buchanan's political philosophy. Boettke and Stein have edited an important, engaging, and highly readable book on this topic."
--BARRY R. WEINGAST, Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; coauthor with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
"A new Tensions in Political Economy series begins by engaging the extraordinarily broad sweep of Buchanan's thought, stressing the primacy he assigned to individuals in collective choice processes and situating his work in the context of the 20th century's scholarly milieu and the ever-expanding state to which orthodoxy gave rise."
--WILLIAM F. SHUGHART II, J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University; editor-in-chief of Public Choice
"Buchanan's Tensions, edited by Peter J. Boettke and Solomon Stein offers an informative and timely contribution to the scholarly literature on James M. Buchanan. Contributors celebrate Buchanan's legacy by exposing solvable and irreconcilable tensions in Buchanan's copious writings."
--S. M. AMADAE, research affiliate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; author of Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003)