Textbook public choice: A review essay

Abstract

Textbooks are of obvious importance to authors and publishers fantasizing about substantial royalties, students expected to purchase and read them, and instructors who choose texts and teach from their pages. While academic custom dictates a certain derision of texts and text-writers, most of the 'greats' in most disciplines have authored at least one text and have often taken considerable pride in their efforts. Regardless, textbooks are invaluable indicators of the state of a discipline and, in a few instances, have been shapers if not innovators of major trends. One thinks of Marshall's Principles; Musgrave's The Theory of Public Finance; Samuelson's Economics; and, now, Alchian and Allen's University Economics. These classics are at once textbooks read by a generation of undergraduates, yet cited by scholars as authoritative sources. Each has produced a host of imitators and imitations; each has served to integrate the known; each has provided a distinct point of view; each has defined problems, provided new tools and, thus, equipped another generation of teachers. Those who teach must have something to teach and what they teach is to a large degree decided by those who write our texts. Uncertainty of substantive content or, perhaps, more accurately, uncertainty as to the integration of disparate elements creates both unsettling problems and an opportunity for those who would impose order. To write a textbook is to impose intellectual order, i.e., decide what is important, why, and how it should be transmitted to colleagues and students, alike. Writing a text in an ordered or settled field of science must surely be one of the more boring uses of one's time, but to write a first-rate text in a new and rapidly evolving 'discipline' demands imagination, substantive knowledge, and literary skills of the highest order. Those who have or are now attempting to provide suitable texts in public choice surely deserve our appreciation and, possibly, admiration, for they chart unknown waters. In market terms most will 'fail,' but one of these days someone will set the pattern and, thereby, provide the first definitive 'Principles of Public Choice.' Most teachers of public choice have taught and continue to teach directly from the classic writings of Arrow, Buchanan and Tullock, Downs, and Olson.