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Remembering Jim Buchanan

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Abstract

James Buchanan was an important influence on the Austrian revival and not incidentally on my own career. By taking the work of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner seriously at a time when Austrian economics was ignored by the economics profession and by making his own contributions to subjectivist economics, Buchanan helped make the Austrian perspective professionally respectable, and inspired a generation of young economists interested in the Austrian school.

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Notes

  1. For an account of the conference on Austrian economics, see (Vaughn 1994a, b, 103–111.)

  2. The proceedings of the session were published by the Institute for Humane Studies with an introduction by Fritz Machlup who had served as session chair (Moss 1976).

  3. In fact, Israel Kirzner once commented that my reading of the calculation debate was perhaps too colored by Buchanan’s notion of the role of subjective cost. In retrospect, Kirzner had a point.

  4. The story of how the Market Processes Center came to George Mason University is another that needs to be told, but I offer only an abbreviated version here. In a phone conversation I had with George Pearson, then with the Institute fof Humane Studies, George mentioned that the Austrian Program currently at Rutgers University, Newark was having difficulty getting faculty approval to hire Austrian trained professors and would like to relocate. As I sat in my basement office in an old and crumbling house off campus watching bugs crawl under the door to get in out of the rain, I said flippantly, “send them here—God knows there is nothing else going on in this place.” After continuing discussing the possibilities in a more serious vein, George immediately had Richard Fink contact me, where upon I talked to our chairman, Bill Snavely who arranged for Rich to interview at GMU. Bill was impressed with Rich’s enthusiasm and drive as well as his promise to raise outside funding for the department. Consequently, he was hired and joined the faculty in 1980. He was followed by Don Lavoie and Jack High in 1981. With four of us as core faculty, we were able to organize the Center for the Study of Market Processes.

  5. I attended that conference, and what I remember most was the feeling of exhilaration that followed from a talk by someone outside the Austrian club who was nevertheless validating Austrian ideas. If I had been on the fence before about my attitude toward Austrian economics, Buchanan clearly pushed me in the direction of the Austrians with that talk.

  6. It was reported to me by Viktor Vanberg that Jim especially liked the fact that we called ourselves the Center for Study of Market Processes rather than Program in Austrian Economics. He felt it was important to focus on a research question rather than on a particular ancestry, a position with which I heartily concurred.

  7. Obviously, New York University is distinguished, but no one to my knowledge would call the economics faculty friendly to Austrian ideas.

  8. I should point out that the integration of the Public Choice Center in our department was not all smooth sailing. As with any business merger, when two cultures come in contact, it is almost inevitable that there would be disagreements and more than a few misunderstandings. Jim was not always an easy person with whom to work. Trying to smooth over the difficulties while seeing to my administrative duties and still trying to keep up a research agenda was a challenge for me discussion of which would be inappropriate in this essay. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties and the usual politics and intrigues that are found in every academic environment, George Mason University’s department of economics was an exciting and invigorating place to be. After 1982, I never thought of leaving because I couldn’t imagine any place I would rather ply my trade.

  9. Ironically, my reservations about Buchanan’s constitutional project came about through an essay I wrote at his encouragement. In 1982, at Buchanan’s urging, I submitted a paper entitled “Can Democratic Societies Reform Themselves: the limits of constructive change” (Vaughn 1994b) to a prize essay contest sponsored by the Mont Pelerin Society. In it, I contrasted Buchanan’s constitutional economics with Hayek’s evolutionary theory of social change, and even though my argument was more in line with Hayek than Buchanan, Jim was very supportive as were the contest judges. I won the prize and was later invited to join the Society. In retrospect, I see that ideas I introduced in that essay became integral to most of my subsequent writing. It is humbling to think that I probably would not have written that paper if Buchanan hadn’t kept prodding me to do so.

References

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Correspondence to Karen I. Vaughn.

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Vaughn, K.I. Remembering Jim Buchanan. Rev Austrian Econ 27, 157–164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-014-0262-z

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