Public choice is a relatively new discipline located at the interface between economics and political science. Its modern founding was the achievement of Duncan Black whose 1948 (a–c) articles are widely viewed as the seminal contributions that launched scholarship in the application of economic analysis into the traditional domain of political science. Yet, it is true that the founding goes back almost two centuries in time, to the late eighteenth century contributions of two French Encyclopedistes, the Compte de Borda and the Marquis de Condorcet. The two French noblemen shared a conviction that social sciences were amenable to mathematical rigor, and made significant contributions to the theory of voting. These contributions form the foundations on which much of modern public choice has been crafted.
This chapter is a revised and updated version of an essay that first appeared in The Encyclopedia of Public Choice edited by Charles K. Rowley and Friedrich Schneider and published in 2004 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Volume I, pp. 146–159.
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Rowley, C.K. (2008). The Perspective of the History of Thought. In: Readings in Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-75870-1_12
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