Gordon Tullock's Scholarly Legacy: Extracting It from Buchanan's Shadow

Abstract

Thinking was Gordon Tullock’s primary interest in life. He let his thinking roam widely and creatively over his many fields of interest; moreover, Tullock is widely recognized for the robust and creative quality of this thought. He left a valuable legacy. All the same, I think the value of that legacy is underappreciated. Too much is Tullock perceived as residing within the shadow of James Buchanan’s constitutional thinking, with Tullock supplying the homo economicus to complement Buchanan’s constitutional concerns. To the contrary, I explain that Tullock and Buchanan resemble divergent parabolas who point analytically in opposing directions despite their common point of origin in the high value they place on individual liberty. Tullock and Buchanan reflected divergent research programs. Unlike Buchanan, however, Tullock left his research program mostly implicit amid his many writings, and in this essay I seek to extract it from Buchanan’s shadow.