Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

The Virginia renaissance in political economy 37was needed to bring attention to and concentrate renewed interest in the traditionthat found its origins in Adam Smith and the eighteenth-century moral philosophers.“Economics as moral philosophy,” or as Alexander Rosenberg puts it,“economics as contractarian political philosophy” (1992: 251) – this describes ourpurpose, then and now, and the words “and social philosophy” were explicitlyadded to the name of the center we sought to establish. We believed that it wasessential to set up some such center complementary with, but independent of, theregular departmental program.The establishment of the Thomas Jefferson Center was easier than we hadthought possible. At the University of Virginia in 1957 there were only two administratorsthat mattered: William L. Duren, Dean of the Faculties, and ColgateDarden, President of the University. When we proposed such a center, the responsewas immediate and favorable. Full speed ahead, with Darden’s contribution beingthe “Thomas Jefferson” designation, advanced in part in the misguided hope thatthe trustees of the Monticello Foundation might prove a source of financial support.(As it turned out, the trustees did not have the foggiest idea of what we wereabout.)But, once established, the very existence of the Thomas Jefferson Center gave usthe basis for seeking external funds. In this quest, we were very fortunate to securea large (for 1957), five-year grant from the William Volker Fund for the purpose ofbringing to Charlottesville, for periods of a semester each, a series of distinguishedscholars in political economy. The inclusive program became exciting indeed aslectures, seminars, and informal discussions were led by scholars such as FrankKnight, F. A. Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Bruno Leoni, Bertil Ohlin, Maurice Allais,T. W. Hutchison, Duncan Black, and O. H. Taylor.Included in the center’s project were funds for a postdoctoral fellowship, andGordon Tullock was the first recipient. Warren Nutter is responsible for bringingTullock to my attention. Nutter and Tullock had been members of the undergraduatedebating team at the University of Chicago in the early 1940s, and Nutterknew that Tullock had resigned from the US Foreign Service after a nine-year stint.Further, Nutter knew that Tullock had written a massive book reciting his personalexperience in the federal bureaucracy – a book that contained, amid the personalanecdotes, a new theory of bureaucracy. 4 I met Tullock briefly at the meetings inPhiladelphia in December 1957, and I read the massive volume, warts and all.I agreed with Warren Nutter that Tullock was worth encouraging; we awardedGordon the first postdoctoral fellowship at the center.During his research year at the center, Gordon commenced his work on majorityrule, and, a year later, he and I decided that we should write a jointly-authoredbook on the economics of politics, taking a constitutional perspective. The Calculus ofConsent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) was the ultimate result.But after his initial fellowship year, Tullock joined the faculty at the University ofSouth Carolina. It was only in 1961, when we had an opening at Virginia, thatTullock was appointed to the faculty in Charlottesville. And this appointment wasalmost solely on my own responsibility. Nutter was perhaps a bit reluctant to bringTullock back as a permanent colleague. Tullock had no PhD in economics; he was