… is from pages xv-xvi of Geoffrey Brennan’s, Hartmut Kliemt’s, and Robert Tollison’s “Foreword” to The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty (1999), which is volume 1 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan (original emphasis):
More specifically, public choice stands in vivid contrast both to the naively optimistic “benevolent despot” model of politics that implicitly inhabits most conventional economic analysis of public policy and to the tradition in political theory that views politics as the search for the “true,” the “good,” the “beautiful” in total isolation from the feasible. Public choice is an attempt, quite literally, to conduct political analysis in a way that is shorn of romantic illusion.