James
McGill Buchanan was born on October 2, 1919, in Rutherford County, Tennessee.
His grandfather, John P. Buchanan, had been elected governor of Tennessee
in 1891. Buchanan attended what was then
Middle Tennessee State
Teachers College, majoring
in mathematics, social science, and English literature, graduating with a B.S.
in 1940. That same year he attended the University
of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he earned the M.A. in economics.
In 1941, he was offered a fellowship in statistics at Columbia
University but was drafted
into the Navy in August of that year due to the impending war. He served in the Pacific under Admiral Chester
Nimitz and was awarded the Bronze Star.
Following
the war, Dr. Buchanan entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago
where he came under the tutelage of Frank Knight. After receiving the doctorate and completing
post-doctoral studies in Italy,
he served on the faculties of
The University of Tennessee and Florida State
University. He joined the faculty of The University of Virginia in 1956 and
became director of the Thomas
Jefferson Center
for Political Economy in 1958. Here
he developed many of the seminal works in public choice including “The Calculus
of Consent.” In 1968, he spent a year
at UCLA before returning to Virginia
to found the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech in 1969.
At VPI, he developed many more key contributions to public choice theory
including, The Limits of Liberty:
Between Anarchy and Leviathan, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy
of Lord Keynes, Freedom in Constitutional Contract, and The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of
a Fiscal Constitution. These works
would eventually result in public choice being recognized as an entire field
of study within the economics profession.
In 1983, Buchanan moved the Public
Choice Center
to George Mason
University and began work on two
more major contributions to the public choice literature, Liberty Market, and State: Political Economy in the
1980s and The Reason of Rules-Constitutional
Political Economy.
In 1986,
Dr. Buchanan was awarded The Nobel Price in Economics for questioning the
accepted conventional wisdom of his time.
He simply applied the same critical tests and logical analysis to public
sector decisions as economists do to those in the private sector. In the early years of his work this was viewed
as heresy. Somehow economists believed
that mankind acted in self-interest in the private sector but quite differently
in the public sector. Jim Buchanan
rose to demonstrate the fallacy of that belief and created a superior understanding
of the public sector. More importantly,
he spawned a discipline which may shape public sector institutions of the
future into more efficient, responsive units providing greater personal and
economic freedom to the public.