This book offers a bold new framework for studying public administration. It incorporates the best ideas that have been developed in the political economy tradition and applies them in innovative ways to perennial problems about governance and the state. A must-read.

David Skarbek, Brown University

This is a marvelous and sophisticated restatement of the classical liberal program. Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko demonstrate that classical liberalism, rather than being a doctrine of anti-government, is a sophisticated theory of public governance-one based on the appreciation of individual diversity, institutional complexity, and the resources of civil society.

Gerald Gaus, James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona

Paul Aligica, Peter Boettke and Vlad Tarko take us on an illuminating theoretical and empirical journey in the study of public governance more generally. They explore the multiple layers of both the economic and political institutional framework that can make a society work well and the social choice processes that are available to meet the challenges of polycentric governance and equity. They combine a fresh analytical and historical perspective on understanding the meaning and limits of self-governance and the experience of collective coordination and administration through a careful analysis of themes, issues areas and cases that go beyond the American case. In so doing, they offer a compelling and original account of the evolving relations between classical liberalism and modernity, equity and governance, and democratic versus bureaucratic administration

Filippo Sabetti, McGill University