Tyler Cowen reports that the economist, James M. Buchanan (Nobel, 1986), has just passed away. Together with his sometime co-author and colleague, Gordon Tullock, Buchanan 'invented' public choice economics. Buchanan had a non-trivial impact on the development of political philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century; he was a keen student of and interlocutor with philosophers, especially Rawls. I will always be very proud to have a paper published alongside the Buchanan-Rawls correspondence.
I also owe a personal debt to Buchanan: he participated in the very first conference on Adam Smith that I co-organized. He was very generous and critical, and made all the young scholars present feel that they were active in an important enterprise. (It's the conference where New Voices on Adam Smith was conceived.)
Some other time I may post a bit more on Buchanan's intellectual development alongside the 'Chicago' and 'Virginia' economists (Nutter, Vining, Knight, etc.) that are part of my scholarly focus (and occasional blogging here).
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