Tullock, Gordon (1922-)

Gordon Tullock is an economist and a sociologist. Although he explicitly rejects the notion of being a libertarian, his work has a special relevance for 20th-century liber-tarianism. His studies on bureaucracies, rent seeking, economic theory of anarchy, and constitutional governance have questioned the “disastrous orthodoxies” of the day regarding the nature, role, and functioning of the state and have challenged what he called the terrible superstition that the government should operate the economy. At the same time, he advanced the frontiers of political economy by creating the intellectual tools that are today used to bolster libertarian arguments and a libertarian agenda. Tullock and his 1962 coauthor, James M. Buchanan, are credited with founding the Public Choice school in economics, a discipline that analyzes the political ...