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Professor Gordon Tullock's New and Collected Works

George Mason Professor of of Law Gordon Tullock is one of the most well-respected scholars in the area of public choice and law and economics. He has been writing in these fields since 1954, and he continues to publish highly-regarded scholarship. Earlier this year, Edward Elgar published a new work by Tullock entitled Public Goods, Redistribution and Rent Seeking. As a testament to Professor Tullock's long publishing history, the Liberty Fund recently began a 10 book series of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, covering writings from 1954 to 2002 . This series is edited by George Mason University’s Duncan Black Professor of Economics Charles K. Rowley, and the first five volumes have already been published. Following is information about Professor Tullock's most recent work as well as a summary of the ten-volume series of his collected works.

Newest Publication

Public Goods, Redistribution and Rent Seeking
By Gordon Tullock
Edward Elgar, 2005
Hardcover: 160 pages
ISBN: 184376637X

Gordon Tullock, eminent political economist and one of the founders of public choice, offers this new and fascinating look at how governments and externalities are linked.

Economists frequently justify government as dealing with externalities, defined as benefits or costs that are generated as the result of an economic activity, but that do not accrue directly to those involved in the activity. In this original work, Gordon Tullock posits that government can also create externalities. In doing so, he looks at governmental activity that internalizes such externalities.

The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock: A Ten Volume Series

During the past half-century Gordon Tullock has continually advanced the frontiers of political economy, most particularly with respect to the workings of representative democracies and autocracies. The Liberty Fund is now publishing a ten-volume collection, The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock. This series, edited and arranged thematically by George Mason University’s Duncan Black Professor of Economics Charles K. Rowley, brings together Tullock’s most significant contributions to economics, political science, public choice, sociology, law and economics, and bioeconomics.

Tullock followed a unique path in his academic career. His exposure to formal economic training was limited to one course taught by Henry Simons as part of the law curriculum at the University of Chicago. Although Tullock does not hold a degree in economics, he is one of the most respected and widely cited economists of the modern age. His influence on modern political economy is simply immense. As Rowley points out in his introduction to the first volume of this series, “Gordon Tullock is an economist by nature rather than by training.” Assuredly, his “outsider” perspective and his intellectual brilliance cultivate an uncommon ability to think “outside the box” and to explain scientifically phenomena that are often intuitively obvious but not readily demonstrated.

Tullock and his 1962 coauthor, Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan, are widely recognized as cofounders of public choice, a field that systematically applies the rational choice approach of economics to the analysis of political markets. Public choice analysts evaluate the impact on political outcomes exercised by voters, special interests, bureaucrats, legislators, and presidents on the assumption that each such actor pursues his own self-interest. In so doing, public choice demonstrates that the “invisible hand,” identified by Adam Smith as associating self-interest in the private marketplace with the wealth of a nation, does not necessarily hold in political markets, where the “visible boot” of government, unless carefully checked, may result in economic ruin.