Gordon Tullock, Praxeology, and the Qualities of a Natural-Born Misesian.

• Author: Boettke, Peter J.
• Position: Critical essay

Gordon Tullock was an economist's economist, or a "natural-born economist." For someone to be a "natural" at doing economics, not simply knowing economics, "is to suggest that he or she has intrinsic talents that emerge independent of professional training, education, and experience" (Buchanan [1987] 2001, 95). As D. N. McCloskey puts it, a "Natural understands economics the first time he hears it. The rest of us need repetitions at higher and higher levels, like a spiral staircase; the Natural does not; he gets the point at the bottom" (1992, 239). Using rational-choice theory, the natural-born economist is able to discern how individuals take actions consistent with their goals or how individuals "do their best" given the constraints they are facing at the moment of choice.

Does having been regarded by other economists as a natural also imply that Gordon Tullock was an economic imperialist, relendessly applying the logic of homo economicus to all walks of life? For those familiar with the depth and breadth of Tullock's application of economic analysis to crime, law, politics, and history, it would seem obvious to answer this question in the affirmative. However, the term economic imperialism implies the injection of the notion of homo economicus to human decision making that is "unnatural" or beyond the realm of traditional economic analysis, such as applying the notion of homo economicus into the realm of nonmarket decision making. For example, economist Edward Lazear defines economic imperialism as "the extension of economics to topics that go beyond the classical scope of issues, which include consumer choice, theory of the firm, (explicit) markets, macroeconomic activity, and the fields spawned directly by these areas. The most aggressive economic imperialists aim to explain all social behavior by using the tools of economics. Areas traditionally deemed to be outside the realm of economics because they do not use explicit markets or prices are analyzed by the economic imperialist" (2000, 103).

Such a characterization of Tullock as a "natural-born economist" would imply, however, that he regarded homo economicus as an unorthodox model to understand human choice outside the realm of markets, including topics such as biology, crime, revolution, and war. However, he understood that the emergence of economics as an intellectual discipline occurred without any strong methodological divide from the other social sciences. As he put it, "Although we can see clearly from their [Adam Smith's and David Hume's] work, particularly, of course, Smith's Wealth of Nations, the origins of scientific economics, it does not appear that they felt that the distinction between economics and the rest of the social sciences was of any great importance. The Wealth of Nations, after all, contains chapters on military affairs, administration of justice, public works, and education.... With Hume and Smith, then, we see an 'economic' approach to a very large part of social behavior" ([1972] 2004, 7-8). What changed, therefore, during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was the common understanding held among economists about what it meant to do economics (see Boettke and Candela 2017).

An alternative way to interpret the depth and breadth of Tullock's contributions to economic science is to regard him as a praxeologist, or a "natural-born Misesian," in that he understood economic analysis to be the most developed subset of a broader and more general science of human action, one that traces the origins of all social phenomena back to individuals' goals. From this perspective, Tullock understood himself as part of a broader tradition of political economy tracing back to Adam Smith. For the natural-born Misesian, homo economicus already exists outside the realm of markets, but the role of the economist as a social scientist is to understand the institutional constraints within which the infinite variations of homo economicus are manifested.

In this paper, we argue that Tullock was not just a "natural-born economist" but more broadly a "natural-born Misesian." Our argument has two aspects. First, we contend that Tullock, like Ludwig von Mises, understood homo economicus broadly as homo agens, or acting man, for whom choice is open-ended, rather than as a Robbinsian maximizer, for whom choice is a close-ended maximization of given means and given ends. As Richard Wagner states, Tullock regarded the logic of choice "as only a point of analytical departure. It was never a destination, for Tullock was always a social theorist who never reduced society to a representative agent" (forthcoming). Second, we argue that Tullock, as a natural-born Misesian, understood homo economicus to be a necessary though not a sufficient condition for understanding patterns of human decision making under alternative institutional arrangements. Taken together, these two views of Tullock's understanding of praxeology give us a perspective on the qualities of the natural-born Misesian.

Tullock: A Critical Link between Austrian Economics and Public Choice

Gordon Tullock was well known as the cofounder of public choice, along with his longtime collaborator, Nobel laureate James Buchanan. However, his development of public choice cannot be understood independently of the influence that Mises's book Human Action ([1949] 1966) had on his understanding of nonmarket decision making. Tullock was, like Mises, a transcendent economic scholar by adopting an understanding of human action that intersected the boundaries of several social sciences. His approach to the economic way of thinking cannot be understood outside the context of his educational and early professional background. Tullock began his academic training as a law student at the University of Chicago. The only course in economics that he ever attended was taught by Henry Simons, (1) but he was able to go to the class for only twelve of thirteen weeks before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. Only after his return from Europe did he complete his Juris Doctorate, graduating in 1947. From 1947 to 1956, Tullock worked for the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service officer in China and Korea. His interests in the Far East led him to begin studies in Chinese at Yale University in 1949, when he first picked up a copy of Human Action. After reading it three times, Tullock said he was going to use the methodology of praxeology, outlined in the initial part of Human Action, to write a book about bureaucracy, which he eventually published in 1965 as The Politics of Bureaucracy (Levy and Peart 2017, 22-23). We return to Tullock's analysis of bureaucracy later in this essay, but before doing so, given the importance of Human Action and praxeology to Tullock's understanding of economics, we define the study of praxeology so as to develop the analytic framework for Tullock's understanding of rationality and spontaneous-order analysis.

Praxeology refers to the science of human action. The word praxeology comes from the Greek words praxis, meaning "action, habit or practice," and logia, meaning "theory or science." Praxeology begins from the a priori category of individual action and then develops the full implications of such action. Mises argued that praxeology was not new, nor was his insistence on the a priori nature of economics. In fact, Mises insisted that all good economics had been done in this way both prior to him and among his contemporaries. In other words, he counted economists from Adam Smith to Frank Knight as being in that same methodological tradition, (2) even if they did not always understand that, and it was this intellectual tradition that Tullock inherited, both from Henry Simons, who was a student of Frank Knight, and directly through his own reading of Mises. (3)

Mises's methodological position, which Tullock embraced, occupies a unique place that is at once both wholly aprioristic and radically empirical (Boettke and Leeson 2006). As Mises wrote, economics "does not strictly separate in its treatises and monographs pure science from the application of its theorems to the solution of concrete historical and political problems. It adopts for the organized presentation of its results a form in which aprioristic theory and the interpretation of historical phenomena are intertwined" ([1949] 1966, 66, emphasis added). From a Misesian perspective, inquiry into social phenomena can be divided into three parts. First, pure theory is the deductive or a priori core of praxeology, which in Hayekian language refers to "the pure logic of choice." At its core, praxeology is the study of the purposive application of means to ends by individual action. This is the basis of rational choice, according to which homo economicusxs the origin of social phenomena such as money, prices, law, and other institutions, which originate from human action but are not of human design. This leads us to the second part of praxeology, applied theory, also known as "catallactics," which is that portion of praxeology that deals specifically with social interaction between individuals. It is the realm of spontaneous-order analysis, from which the unintended emergence of money, prices, and institutions can be traced back to human action. By combining the pure logic of choice with various subsidiary assumptions of a particular time and place, such as private property, prices, and profit-and-loss signals, the economist can explain the various manifestations of rationality under alternative institutional contexts. The third part, economic history, is where the analyst takes the arguments constructed in pure and applied theory and develops a framework of analysis that aids the empirical interpretation of events, thereby providing an economic assessment of those events. It is in this way, we contend, that Tullock understood homo economicus, both as a category of human action and as its empirical...