I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Gordon Tullock 361
After leaving Yale and Cornell I was sent to far Eastern posts and then to the far Eastern
bureaucracy in Washington. When I resigned I had no intention of going into academe.
Indeed I thought I would take up a job with a foreign trading agency in the Far East. This
plan was dropped for various reasons, one of which was my four months association with
Karl Popper. I was helping him with stylistic problems in connection with the revision of
his book on scientific method. This was in California and I used the time to investigate
prospects of getting started as a foreign trader in the Far East.
I then went to New Haven for the purpose of finishing off my book on bureaucracy.
There I met Richard Walker, a China expert who, remarkably for that time, did not like
the Communists. This made us friends, and when he was simultaneously fired by Yale for
being “too controversial” and hired by South Carolina to start a new department of international
studies, he invited me to join him.
As a sort of byproduct of meeting Walker, he introduced me to Karl Wittfogel and his
book, Oriental Despotism. This deals with the origins of civilization in Middle Eastern river
valleys. The civilization there depended on large-scale irrigation and due to the engineering
problems of moving large bodies of water they required strong central government for each
irrigation network. The governments created were unpleasant enough so that the word
“despotism” fit them, but they did support large populations in what would appear to be
very unfavorable environments. This early despotism has also made significant contributions
to culture. That is where reading and writing was invented. Their contributions to
science and art were also great.
I had arranged to have a number of mimeographed copies of my book on bureaucracy
made and circulated them to various publishers and other people I thought would be
interested. All publishers turned it down and when I eventually did get it published it sold
so few copies that I am sure their judgment was commercially correct. Intellectually it had
considerable influence, however.
One of these copies went to the University of Virginia and I was invited to visit them
for one year as a post-doc before I went to South Carolina. There I met James Buchanan
and learned a lot of economics from him. I think, in reciprocation, he learned a lot about
formal politics from me. My first article in this area, which dealt with logrolling, was written
then and published in the Journal of Political Economy. I also wrote a monograph of
about eighty pages on the application of economic-type reasoning to politics which we
mimeographed and distributed privately.
When I returned to South Carolina, Jim suggested that we write a joint book in the
area. As he explained in the preface he actually did the labor, but a good deal of the content
was mine. We got immediate publication and the book, The Calculus of Consent: Logical
Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), rapidly became a classic. I still receive
royalties almost fifty years after it was published.
Meanwhile in South Carolina I was teaching international studies with little in the
way of economics. I insisted on the students getting at least the rudiments of game theory
and made efforts, I’m afraid unsuccessfully, to convince them that free trade was a good
idea. Basically, however, I taught foreign policy. Both Walker and I, of course, were regarded