Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School.

• Author: Holcombe, Randall G.

Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School

By David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Pp. xvi, 292. $110 hardcover.

As its subtitle reveals, this book is aimed at readers who are interested in the early history of the Virginia School of political economy. The book discusses that history from two different vantage points. First, it discusses the ideas that distinguish Virginia political economy from other schools of thought and, most pointedly, from the neoclassical orthodoxy of the 1950s and 1960s, when the Virginia School was taking on its distinctive identity. Second, it examines the challenges the individuals in the Virginia School faced to gain both acceptance and funding.

Although many books have been written about the ideas of the Virginia School, especially the ideas of James Buchanan, the central figure in the development of the school, one big contribution this book makes is that it contains many previously unpublished documents that show the struggle Buchanan and his colleagues had in trying to establish their school. That struggle was on the two fronts noted in the previous paragraph: the struggle for acceptance of the school's ideas and the struggle to fund the school's programs.

The Virginia School's origins might be traced back to the establishment of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy (TJC) at the University of Virginia in 1957, spearheaded by Buchanan and Warren Nutter. The book discusses earlier work of Virginia School scholars--most notably, Buchanan's earlier work--as well as the influence of "the old Chicago School" and the ideas of Frank Knight. Buchanan is heavily featured in the book, making the ideas of the Virginia School appear to be Buchanan's and other supporting individuals' ideas. This conflation seems appropriate because Buchanan's ideas had the largest impact in shaping the school's unique identity.

The book looks at the methodological differences between the Virginia School in its early years and mainstream scholars, including Kenneth Arrow and George Stigler, but the difficulties the school faced were often based more on ideological issues. The Virginia School and Buchanan in particular had a strong classical liberal orientation that ran into opposition both from a funding standpoint and from others at the University of Virginia.

A funding proposal by the TJC in 1961 was rejected by the Ford...