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Introduction
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2004 by Joseph C. Pitt, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Douglas Eckel
Introduction
In 1968 a series of events led to the creation of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. For the ensuing 15 years the Center was the focus of a large body of research that has come to be known as "public choice," much of which was actually produced at the Center. The success of the intellectual enterprise in Blacksburg took even its originators by surprise (see the papers by Buchanan and Wagner in this volume). How could transplanting a group of social scientists from the well-known Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy and Social Philosophy at the University of Virginia, with its nationally recognized programs in economics and the social sciences, to what was then a technical institute with a fledging Department of Economics help promote a new field? This question was the theme of a conference in Blacksburg in May 2000, honoring James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock for their contributions to Virginia Tech and celebrating the return of James Buchanan to Virginia Tech as University Distinguished Professor of Economics and Philosophy Emeritus.
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A major characteristic of public choice as a field is its interdisciplinary nature. Its prominence today owes as much to its impact on economics, which transformed public finance and political economy, as to its impact on other disciplines--most importantly political science, sociology, and philosophy. Before coming to Blacksburg, Buchanan and Tullock were already well known for their seminal book, The Calculus of Consent (1962), which many recognize as having started the field of public choice. But, as Wagner notes in this volume, public choice at the University of Virginia was seen as a subset of the broader program in political economy to which several notable economists with little interest in public choice belonged (Ronald Coase, Warren Nutter, Rutledge Vining, and Leland Yeager). In Blacksburg, however, where the program started from scratch, public choice had the opportunity to define itself free from any restriction imposed by the discipline from which it sprang. This freedom was perhaps most valuable for the forays into other disciplines.
The enterprise in Blacksburg merits study as an example of successful production and diffusion of knowledge and theory in social science. The contributors to the conference were asked to help us understand the reasons behind this success. We hoped that an examination of the development and diffusion of the public choice research program could help us understand ways in which new efforts to produce knowledge in the social sciences might be organized. We put several specific questions to the conference participants:
* Does public choice represent a useful model of the interdisciplinary production and diffusion of knowledge, one in which old boundaries are ignored and new technologies are freely appropriated outside their areas of development?
* How was the geographical and intellectual isolation of the Center for the Study of Public Choice in Blacksburg conducive to elaboration of a creative and complex interdisciplinary program?
* To what extent did public choice encounter resistance from other disciplines?
Their responses provide us with an interesting mix of factors, ranging from the architecture of the building in which the Center was housed and the isolation of Blacksburg, to the leadership qualities of Buchanan and Tullock, to the fact that both fields of economics and political science were at the time ripe for change.
The development of public choice and its integration into this range of fields follows a pattern characteristic of the birth and growth of an academic field. It is a pattern that reflects to some degree, but does not completely emulate, Thomas Kuhn's account of the development of science. Kuhn's account, which moves a science through three stages--normal science, anomaly buildup, crisis and paradigm shift--and then back to normal science, focuses on the change from one theory of paradigm to another. The accumulation of anomalies results either in the resolution of anomalies with the old paradigm or in a revolution. The revolution can take one of two forms, but always includes the formation of a new paradigm. In one case it replaces the older paradigm; in the other case it does not. The standard reading of Kuhn always requires paradigm replacement. That reading, however, is too restricted. When Kuhn talks about the development of new theories within a paradigm as new paradigms, he does not require abandoning the old paradigm.
Our concern is with the birth of a new field of inquiry and its diffusion into already established areas, not with Kuhnian paradigm shifts as such. Nevertheless, there are similarities. The following is a list of such stages. It is not intended to provide necessary and sufficient criteria for the growth and diffusion of the insights of a new field, but rather to capture the basic steps in the birth of a new field and the diffusion of its insights into other areas. Sometimes we observe all of the stages, sometimes only a subset.
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