Situating Southern Influences in James M. Buchanan and Modern Public Choice Economics

Art Carden (), Vincent Geloso () and Phillip W. Magness ()
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Art Carden: Samford University
Vincent Geloso: George Mason University
Phillip W. Magness: American Institute for Economic Research

Chapter Chapter 21 in Standard of Living, 2022, pp 465-475 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In her 2017 book Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean identifies John C. Calhoun as the “lodestar” of public choice theory and argues that the conservative Southern Agrarian poets (Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others) were influential in the formation of 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan’s worldview. We test this argument with reference to the scholars cited in Buchanan’s collected works and elsewhere. The evidence for any direct or even indirect influence of Calhoun and the Agrarians is very scant, and we conclude that Buchanan’s intellectual program was shaped far more by Knut Wicksell, Frank Knight, and the Italian public finance tradition than by Calhoun or early twentieth-century segregationists.

Keywords: James M. Buchanan; Segregation; South; Public choice; Constitutional political economy; John C. Calhoun; Southern Agrarians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stechp:978-3-031-06477-7_21

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06477-7_21

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