This essay attempts to portray the story of public choice as an intellectual enterprise. I discuss James Buchanan’s perspective on public choice as collective decision making and politics as complex exchanges. To this foundation of public choice, Tullock introduced rent seeking which opened up a new dimension in public choice research. It allowed (us) to analyze the causes of government failure. Much work has been written on these subjects and will continue so (to be done). However, Buchanan’s work after his Nobel (1986) has not been much discussed as carefully as it should be. This is unfair to Buchanan as a thinker. To cover this, I discuss his work on generalized increasing returns and the economics of ethics.