R. H. Coase Duncan Black was a close and dear friend. A man of great simplicity, un worldly, modest, diffident, with no pretensions, he was devoted to scholarship. In his single-minded search for the truth, he is an example to us all. Black's first degree at the University of Glasgow was in mathematics and physics. Mathematics as taught at Glasgow seems to have been designed for engineers and did not excite him and he switched to economics, which he found more congenial. But it was not in a lecture in economics but in one on politics that he found his star. One lecturer, A. K. White,...

Duncan Black made a significant contribution to the development of public choice theory during his lifetime. Upon his death it became apparent that much of his scholarship and critique of economics was never published. Formal Contributions to the Theory of Public Choice is a collection of Duncan Black's unpublished works, representing his continuing contribution to economics and political science. It provides an insight into Black's intellectual endeavors and introduces some new ideas and extensions of earlier work.

This is a book about a well-known writer, Lewis Carroll, and about a little-known subject, the theory of voting' (from the Editors' Introduction).
This book has been edited from the manuscripts of the late Scottish economist Duncan Black. Shortly after the publication of The Theory of Committees and Elections Black started to collect material for papers and a book on Lewis Carroll's theory of proportional representation. Black's chapter plans made it clear that the book was to be in three parts, written by himself, followed by a reprint of Carroll's Principles of...

Duncan Black aims to formulate a pure science of politics by focusing on mathematics of committees and elections.

THIS book or some related work has occupied me spasmodically over rather a long period, in fact ever since I listened to the class lectures of Professor A. K. White on the possibility of forming a pure science of Politics. Mter an earlier version of Part I had failed to obtain publication in 1947, some chapters appeared as articles, and I am obliged to the editors of the journals mentioned below for permission to reprint this material, sometimes in a modified form. When I first attempted publication I was unacquainted with the earlier history of the theory, and, indeed, did not even know that...