The Epistemic Origins of Richard E. Wagner’s Realist Defense of Liberalism

Abstract

This chapter revisits the scholarly contributions made by Richard Wagner in the 1970s and connects them to entangled political economy, an analytical approach Wagner developed in the 2010s. The focus is on three papers: a 1975 paper, coauthored with Warren Weber, on governmental overlapping, a 1976 paper on fiscal illusion, and a 1976 paper on public advertising. All three papers reject the competitive model of democracy and explore epistemic qualities of political interactions, creating a foundation for the study of the tension between liberalism and monopolistic democracy, which later became a key characteristic of Wagner’s scholarship. The first paper analyzes the challenges to the formation of accurate perceptions of the price and quality of government output and attributes them to the bundling of government provision that occurs alongside reductions of governmental overlapping. The second paper explains fiscal illusion as a product of complex tax revenue structures. The third paper combines these insights and explains public advertising as nothing more but an effort to encourage citizens’ acquiescence.