Abstract
This chapter suggests that Tullock has made more profound contributions to constitutional political economy and other related fields than he is recognized for, in part, because he himself has failed to recognize that aspect of his work. Gordon is not self-consciously pursuing the profound, but simply pushing out the frontiers of knowledge in as many directions as occur to him, more or less as rapidly as possible for a very insightful active man. Carefully integrating his research and plumbing its depths has largely been left to others.
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Notes
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This conclusion is based on several decades of conversations and arguments with Gordon Tullock. I took Gordon’s graduate public choice course at Virginia Polytechnic University in 1976, where Gordon was, in his own way, very generous with students. He was my colleague at George Mason University many years later for more than a decade.
I was the director of the Center for Study of Public Choice when Gordon returned to George Mason University in 1999. Upon his arrival, I invited Gordon to join my Friday “visitor’s lunch,” which he did nearly every week until he retired. As a consequence, the visitor’s lunch rapidly became Tullock’s lunch, as the Center for Study of Public Choice’s visiting scholars and I were challenged and entertained by Gordon’s wry humor, insights, and argumentative style of discourse.
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Congleton, R.D. (2013). On Some Neglected, But Profound, Contributions of Gordon Tullock. In: Lee, D. (eds) Public Choice, Past and Present. Studies in Public Choice, vol 28. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5909-5_3
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