James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock: A Reflection on Two Disruptive Economists

Abstract

This chapter offers the author’s personal reflections on encounters with James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as individuals, as intellectuals, and as providers of major unsettling ideas that formed new chapters in the history of economic thought. The story includes personal encounters as a graduate student, faculty member, and government economist and tells how these two unusual men and their ideas contributed to the author’s professional growth. Buchanan’s and Tullock’s major insights are described as being as powerful as they were disruptive to the intellectual status quo. In short, the more disruptive, the more powerful. Together and separately, the two scholars laid some of the largest stones in the foundation on which modern political economy has been erected.