This essay reviews Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean’s almost biographical account of James...

This article studies the few works James Buchanan wrote on education from the end of the 1950s to the early 1970s. These neglected works tell us important things about how Buchanan's ideas on constitutions evolved through time, because they provided Buchanan with the opportunity to apply his...

The Coase theorem is associated with Stigler because Stigler coined the term. The object of this paper is to show that Stigler's Coase theorem is Stiglerian for deeper – namely, methodological – reasons. We argue that, convinced as he was by the importance of Coase's message, Stigler also...

Virginia Political Economy (VPE), one of the main branches of Public Choice, is often if not always associated with the names of a few scholars, the leaders of a school in economics. It is particularly significant that these scholars never worked alone. At the University of Virginia, where it...

The goal of this paper is to study the consequences of non-reciprocal or unilateral altruism, that is, of altruism between individuals who have different concern for others. By contrast to what the literature usually shows — that unilateral altruists lead egoists to cooperate, that...

Richard Posner's “What Do Judges and Justices Maximize?” (1993a) is not, as usually believed, the first analysis of judges' behaviors made by using the assumption that judges are rational and maximize a utility function. It arrived at the end of a rather long process. This paper recounts the...

This article proposes to reassess Hayek's theory of cultural evolution in the light of Darwin's Descent of Man. It is shown that Hayek and Darwin refers to the same theory of human nature which is borrowed from the founding fathers of political economy, Hume and Smith. Their respective...