The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan

This monumental twenty-volume series presents 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.

"This is a series," write the editors, "that no serious scholar of public choice theory, public economics, or contemporary political theory will want to be without. It has—perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar—helped us to view politics without the romantic gloss that characterizes much normative political theory and that slips unthinkingly into so much popular commentary. Buchanan has been a resolute defender of 'the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals' and has been a painstaking analyst of the institutional structure that might best support such a society. Buchanan stands with von Mises, Hayek, Popper, and Friedman as one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty.'

The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan is a vast and significant twenty-volume series that includes ten monographs and all of the important journal articles, papers, and essays that Buchanan has produced in a distinguished career spanning more than half a century. Among the monographs are such famous works as The Calculus of Consent (coauthored by Gordon Tullock) and The Limits of Liberty, as well as such gems as Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory. The monographs have been cast into a new format, and in those cases in which no index, or only a partial index, was originally provided, new indexes have been created. In addition, each volume includes a foreword by one of the three editors of the series, each of whom is a distinguished economist in his own right.

Volume 20 presents a comprehensive index to the entire series and an annotated copy of the entire curriculum vitae, indicating in which volume in the series the various items appear and, correspondingly, those items that have been omitted.

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 sacrificing ourselves to the dictates of the state."