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New from Liberty Fund is this monumental twenty-volume collection of the writings of James M. Buchanan, one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty. Buchanan, the Nobel laureate in Economics in 1986, has much wisdom to offer—not just to economists and academics—but to all who seek to understand the challenges and opportunities of governance in our age.
The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan is an important contribution to the study of an important economist and a scholar of liberty, a man who has always been able to view his work from an appropriate perspective. As James Buchanan has written, “My interest in understanding how the economics interaction process works has always been instrumental to the more inclusive purpose of understanding how we can learn to live with one another without engaging in Hobbesian war and without subjecting ourselves to the dictates of the state.”

"The thirty-one papers presented in this volume offer scholars and general readers alike a comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the greatest economists of the modern era. Many of Buchanan's most important essays are gathered in this inaugural volume of the twenty-volume series from Liberty Fund of his Collected Works.

The essays are arranged thematically and so present a complete perspective on Buchanan’s work. The six sections include:

1. Introduction
2. Politics without Romance
3. Public Finance and Democratic Process
4. The Economist and Economic Order
5. Ethics and Economics
6. The Reason of Rules

The editors have focused on papers that Buchanan has written without collaboration and which present Buchanan's earlier, classic statements on crucial subjects rather than his subsequent elaborations which appear in later volumes in the series. Included, too, is Buchanan's Nobel address, ""The Constitution of Economic Policy,"" and the text of the Nobel Committee's press release explaining why Buchanan was awarded the prize for Economics in 1986. The volume also includes Buchanan's autobiographical essay, ""Better Than Plowing,"" in which he gives not only a brief account of his life, but also his own assessment of what is important, distinctive, and enduring in his work. The foreword by the three series editors will be valuable to all readers who wish to engage the challenging but epochal writings of the father of modern public choice theory. "

James M. Buchanan

In 1986 James M. Buchanan (1919-2012) was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Universally respected as one of the founders of the “public choice” school of economics, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics and economic philosophy. He is best known for such works as The Calculus of Consent, The Limits of Liberty, The Power to Tax, and The Reason of Rules. Buchanan has devoted himself to the study of the contractual and constitutional basis for the theory of economic and political decision making.

See also at Econlib: the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics entry on Buchanan