Virginia Political Economy: the Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Volume 1.

• Author: Niskanen, William A.
• Position: Book Review

Virginia Political Economy: The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Volume 1 Charles K. Rowley (ed.) Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2004, 642 pp.

Virginia Political Economy is the first volume in a 10-volume series of the scholarly articles and monographs by Gordon Tullock from 1954 through 2002. The complete series has been edited by Charles K. Rowley, who has also written a separate introduction for each volume. This first volume, in effect, is an introduction to the whole series by including selected early articles in each subject area to which Tullock has made a major contribution. This first volume also includes a brief biographical note and a table of contents for the whole series. Each of the subsequent volumes includes one or more of the most important contributions by Tullock to a specific subject area.

The most impressive characteristic of the first volume is a reminder of the range of subjects to which Tullock has made an important contribution. The major sections of this first volume address the following issues: the imperialism of economics, especially with respect to political science; the problems of majority voting; the demand-revealing process; rent seeking; redistributive polities; the problem of social cost; law and economies; bioeconomics; and the limited relevance of the public interest theory.

Tullock has maintained a roughly constant utilitarian perspective on each of these issues over the past 50 years, even when it leads him, as in law and economics, to a position that is quite different from most other scholars working on these issues. But he does not insist that utilitarianism explains all human behavior, only that part which is explainable without knowing the distinctive personalities and biographies of those involved. In addition to his coauthorship of The Calculus of Consent (with James Buchanan), the major individual contributions for which Tullock still deserves the Nobel Prize are his proofs that democracy usually works rather better than suggested by the theories of Kenneth Arrow and Duncan Black and that the social costs of inefficient policies are substantially larger than suggested by Arnold Harberger. But there should also be some reward, wherever economists spend their afterlife, for making valuable contributions to so many subjects, for good writing, and for relatively little use of mathematics.

One of Tullock's major early articles (1959) explains the effects of vote-trading (logrolling) in a...