Growing up with The Calculus of Consent

Abstract

It is fair to say that most of my academic life has been influenced by The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Buchanan and Tullock 1962) I was an undergraduate at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (“Virginia Tech”) just after the Center for Study for Public Choice was founded there. I joined that university’s new graduate program in economics after a somewhat fortuitous contact with Charles Goetz, a founding member of the Center and former Buchanan student. The graduate courses were taught for the most part by scholars hired after the Center was up and running. I wrote my dissertation under James Buchanan’s guidance and a significant strand of the dissertation was influenced by a more or less casual conversation with Gordon Tullock while driving to a conference in Northern Virginia. In the late 1980s, after a decade of teaching at small private liberal arts, business, and engineering schools, I became a faculty member at the Center, shortly after it moved to George Mason University. The Calculus also clearly was very important to the careers of Buchanan and Tullock. Without that book, the names “Buchanan and Tullock” would not be closely linked in the minds of public choice or other scholars. Without the success of that book, it is likely that neither of these fine scholars would have had such a profound impact on economics and political science. This is not to say that they would not have been acknowledged as significant scholars without The Calculus, but it is to say that the success of that book lifted both men to a new level of prominence and placed them at the head of a two extremely fertile fields of research that grew rapidly for several decades. The new fields of inquiry came to be known as public choice and constitutional political economy. Without The Calculus, it is quite possible that the Public Choice Society would not have been founded, nor the Center for Study of Public Choice at Blacksburg. And it is doubtful