Alain Marciano

Dr. Alain Marciano is a Professor at the University of Turin in the Department of Economics and Statistics and member of the LAMETA (UMR CNRS-INRA 5474) Research Center in Montpellier. He is also a Distinguished Affiliated Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Karl Mittermaier Centre for Philosophy of Economics at University of Johannesburg.

His research program explores how individuals coordinate with one another and when they need “formal” institutions to complement “informal” social norms. This has led him to studying James Buchanan’s views on social contract theory, culminating into his most recent project, James Buchanan: The Disillusionment of an Optimistic Economist (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which will be the first intellectual biography of the Nobel Laureate. 

He has published numerous books, including James Buchanan and Peaceful Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2024), the edited volume Constitutional Mythologies: New Perspectives on Controlling the State (Springer, 2011), and Democracy, Freedom and Coercion: A Law and Economics Approach (Edward Elgar, 2007) coedited with Jean-Michel Josselin. 

He has also published numerous articles in HOPE (History of Political Economy), the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the International Review of Law and Economics, Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, Biology and Philosophy, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

For further publications by Marciano, visit his website.