Ideas, Persons, and Events

This final volume (save for the Index) in Liberty Fund’s The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan acquaints us most intimately with the man himself. Included are essays and short pieces that shed light on Buchanan’s view of the world.

Ranging from personal reflections on the art and science of economics, to restatements of his central themes and reminiscences of his encounters and collaborations with other great thinkers, this volume presents James Buchanan as a multidimensional human being, not just as a great economic and political thinker.

The thirty-three pieces collected in Ideas, Persons, and Events are grouped into these categories:

1. Autobiographical and Personal Reflections
2. Reflections on Fellow Political Economists
3. Political Economy in the Post-Socialist Century
4. Reform without Romance

As Hartmut Kliemt states in his foreword, “The personal and the theoretical are often inseparably intertwined in the essays of this volume. . . . As a case in point, consider James Buchanan’s account of his relationship to Frank Knight. This account not only sheds some interesting light on the personal element in the development of science, it also offers some new perspectives on the concept of the ‘relatively absolute absolutes,’ which has been so central to Buchanan’s thinking in general.”

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) was an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and was considered one of the greatest scholars of liberty in the twentieth century.