The two volumes under review allow us to look at the half-century's scholarship of the leading public finance economist of that half-century. The papers included are well organized into major categories, even if not precisely those indicated in the volumes' titles, and, within each category, the selections are arranged chronologically. Volume One is prefaced by a teasingly short autobiographical eassay, which is supplemented, in part, by Chapter 8 which is the lecture delivered on the occasion of an honorary degree at Heidelberg (1983), Musgrave's first academic home.
The first paper in Volume One is, appropriately, Richard Musgrave's first publication in a major journal, his 1939 evaluation of the voluntary exchange theory of the public economy. As surprising as it may seem, this paper represented the very first introduction of the extensive, and productive, European scholarship in public finance theory to English-language readers. And it was this European scholarship that provided the foundations both for the formalization of normative public finance by Paul Samuelson and the somewhat later emergence of public choice, as an independent subdiscipline.
The second paper in Volume One is an early introduction of Musgrave's tripartite budgetary classification, a taxonomy that he successfully imposed on public finance economics through the publication of his 1959 treatise, Theory of Public Finance. In retrospect, it is, I think, fair to say that public finance was in intellectual disarray in the early 1950s. Marshallian incidence theory along with Pigovian-Edgeworthian utilitarian normative principles of taxation had characterized pre-World War II English-language public finance. This structure had already been shocked by the Robbins critique of utilitarianism, by Keynesian fiscal policy, and by Samuelson's formal theory of public expenditure emerging from theoretical welfare economics. Richard Musgrave, almost alone, was able to re-establish intellectual order through his treatise, a book that was, almost literally, waiting to be written. His three-part breakdown of the budget allowed economists to separate conceptually the allocative function of the public economy, to which the norms of theoretical welfare economics could be applied, from the transfer or redistributive function, to which utilitarian or other social welfare function apparatus might be extended