Abstract
This essay introduces a collection of 49 essays that exemplify the breadth and the depth of James M. Buchanan’s (1919–2013) contributions to economics in the post-war period. Buchanan started his career in 1948 as someone who wanted to provide a different scholarly framework for a theory of public finance and managed to do so. What resulted was a scholarly output that was published in 20 volumes in 2002, to which he continued to add until his death. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth and depth of Buchanan’s contributions to political economy and social philosophy. While these essays are written by people who admired and learned from Buchanan’s work, these are not essays in hagiography. They explore various questions and topics that interested Buchanan. A good number of these explorations have critical overtones, but most significantly they build upon lines of inquiry that animated Buchanan’s scholarly curiosity.
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Between 1999 and 2002, Liberty Fund collected and published Buchanan ’s work in 20 volumes. While that collection included most though not all of Buchanan ’s published work to that time, Buchanan continued to publish after 2002, and even had several items published after his death in 2013.
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Wagner, R.E. (2018). Who Was James M. Buchanan and Why Is He Significant?. In: Wagner, R. (eds) James M. Buchanan. Remaking Economics: Eminent Post-War Economists. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_1
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