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

42 James M. Buchananimpact. It did not stimulate much direct or immediate interest in monetaryconstitutions, due in part perhaps to the untimely dating of publication, 1962, atthe precise onset of the apogee years of the translation of the “Keynesian wisdom”into practical politics.When, however, attention came again to be focused on monetary institutionsafter the demonstrable failures evidenced by the stagflation-inflation of the 1970sand 1980s, the 1962 book emerged into a new position of current relevance. Laterefforts that introduced a constitutional approach to analyses of monetary arrangementswere, in one sense, based on the Yeager enterprise. (See Brennan andBuchanan 1981; Buchanan 1983.)The Virginia decade in perspectiveWe are four decades removed from the academic history that I have recalled. Ihave, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, defined the “Virginia decade in politicaleconomy” to include the years 1957 through 1967, the years during which theprogram was initiated, developed, matured, and “died” in its own fashion. Despiteits within-university, beyond-economics evaluation, the program was an externalsuccess, as measured by almost any objective set of criteria.It is easy to speculate about “what might have been” had the university leadershipnot been blinded by its ideological baggage. How might Virginia’s program inpolitical economy have fared if the university had chosen to retain AndrewWhinston and Ronald Coase on its faculty, neither of whom wanted to leave theCharlottesville scene, had not Gordon Tullock’s promotion been thrice denied,had Warren Nutter’s major work on Soviet industrial growth not been “sent toCoventry” by American Sovietologists, with the consequent feedback into our ownuniversity setting?Even with these questions answered differently from the history we livedthrough, perhaps Virginia’s decade would still have stood as a period apart. By theearly 1960s tensions had already developed between Coase and Vining, and I hadbeen personally upset by the cavalier treatment accorded to John Moes. Nutter wasnever wholly sympathetic to the extension of analysis to politics, and had Coaseremained on the faculty, it would surely have been more difficult for Tullock andme to shift research emphasis so strongly in that direction. After 1963, publicchoice, as a research program on its own and distinct from political economy, waswaiting to be born. But I wonder aloud whether such birth could have happened atall in Charlottesville.At least from my own private and quite personal perspective, in the new century,it seems best to discard all speculation about the might have beens and enjoy andappreciate the remembered history of that which was accomplished in a relativelyshort span of years. We were fortunate in the sense that the University of Virginiawas sufficiently prestigious to insure that our program had significant spillovereffects on academia well beyond Mr. Jefferson’s serpentine walls, while at the sametime the university was sufficiently provincial to insure that our efforts would not besmothered immediately by the dominant academic ideology. We simply exploited