The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

How I Didn't Become a Libertarian

by Gordon Tullock
by Gordon Tullock

I am not only not a libertarian, I'm not even an Austrian. Walter Block however wants me to explain the origin of what ideas I do have, and I think it may amuse.

To begin with I was born and brought up in Rockford, Illinois in a solidly midwestern conservative family. We all hated Roosevelt, and thought that an annually balanced budget and high protective tariffs were the essence of good economic policy. I had no intention of studying economics and planned on becoming a lawyer.

In the University of Chicago law school everyone was required to take a one-quarter course in economics taught by Henry Simons. In my case it was only ten weeks because the draft board intervened. In the ten weeks, however, Simons radically changed my intellectual persona. I became a free trader and adopted the Chicago attitude on money. In addition I learned a lot of other economics, and indeed I believe that I receive the highest grade that Henry Simons ever gave in that course. This is not a very strong statement, however, since law students tended to do badly in economics.

On completing my legal training I practiced law in a downtown Chicago firm for about four months and then joined the diplomatic service and was sent to Tientsin China. I was surprised to discover that most of my colleagues favored the Communists. This was also the policy of the Department of State although they didn't actually advertise it. They imposed an arms embargo on the nationalists thus making their victory impossible. They might have lost anyway, of course.

At first Tientsin was under Nationalist control but about a year after I arrived the Communists conquered the city. I spent a year under the Communists in Tientsin. It was nerve wracking, but nothing really bad happened to me. We did not have diplomatic privileges because they did not recognize us. During that year all of my colleagues lost their illusions about communism in China, but many of them continued to think the Nationalists were worse.

I returned to the United States and was sent to Yale and Cornell for two years to study Chinese. I now realize that this was a bad mistake. I am tone deaf and Chinese is a tone language. My education was improved by the experience however. One day I saw a big pile of books in red covers entitled Human Action. I bought one and read it through three times in the next couple of months. I never became an actual Austrian, but there clearly was a strong influence. Indeed my first book The Politics of Bureaucracy used Von Mises' methods extensively.

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 the 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 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" fitted 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 postdoc 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 80 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, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962 rapidly became a classic. I still receive royalties almost 50 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 unsuccessful, to convince them that free trade was a good idea. Basically, however, I taught foreign policy. Both Walker and I, of course, were regarded as far right by the foreign policy establishment, but at least, for the time being, we were protected in our tiny niche.

Eventually Buchanan succeeded in getting me an offer from Virginia as associate professor at a higher wage than South Carolina was paying. Walker was away in Washington at the time, so I didn't get an attractive counteroffer. I should say that the University of Virginia flatly refused to promote me for number of years, with the result that eventually I left. Buchanan left shortly after.

I had already published the first and second issues of what eventually became Public Choice using my own funds and my friendly contacts with a University of Virginia printer. Subscribers and contributors to this journal formed a little quasi-society originally funded by the National Science Foundation which eventually decided to call itself the Public Choice Society. From then on my work was primarily on government rather than strict economics.

As the reader can see, none of this is particularly Austrian. My contact with von Mises was always friendly, but his aversion to indifference curves and statistics turned me off. In a way, I am the product of my intellectual education which began with foreign policy and law and then moved by way of Chicago and Von Mises into economics and in particular its application for governmental problems. The true libertarian will regard all of this as "deviationism," but I urge tolerance.

August 7, 2003

Gordon Tullock [send him mail] is Professor, Economics and Law, at George Mason University.

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