"My interest in understanding how the economic interaction process works has always been instrumental to the more inclusive purpose of understanding how we can learn to live one with one another without engaging in Hobbesian war and without subjecting ourselves to the dictates of the state." James M Buchanan. In one of the major publishing endeavours of recent decades, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, the Nobel laureate in Economics in 1986, is being published in twenty volumes under the auspices of The Liberty Fund. The series will include ten monographs and all of the important journal articles, papers, and essays that Buchanan has produced in a distinguished career spanning more than a half-century. The monographs will appear in a new form and with the addition of indexes in those cases where no index or only a partial index was originally provided. In addition, each volume includes a foreword by one of the series' three editors, Professors Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Robert D Tollison, each of whom is a distinguished economist in his own right. This is a series that no serious scholar of public choice theory, public economics, or contemporary political theory will want to be without. It is a series that will also appeal to the general student of liberty, for Buchanan has, perhaps more than any other contemporary scholar, helped us to view politics without the romantic gloss that characterises so much normative political theory and that slips unthinkingly into so much popular commentary. Buchanan has been a resolute defender of 'the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals,' and has been a painstaking analyst of the institutional structure that might best support such a society. Buchanan stands with von Mises, Hayek, Popper, and Friedman as one of the great twentieth-century scholars of liberty."