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Abstract
In 1983, James Buchanan, director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and future Nobel Prize winner in economics, moved the entire Public Choice Center with its seven faculty members to George Mason University. At the time, George Mason was a young and largely unknown state university. Recruiting so many relatively expensive faculty to join one department in a chronically underfunded school represented a significant risk for the university administration. Yet, the rewards consequent to that move turned out to be well worth the risk. The immediate benefit was that both the economics department and the university as a whole gained instant professional recognition, to the benefit of faculty and students alike. In the long run, recruiting the Public Choice Center was the catalyst for the subsequent remarkable growth the university enjoyed both in size and in academic accomplishment.
JEL codes: B25, B31
Keywords: James Buchanan, Public Choice Center, George Mason University
I. Introduction
james Buchanan is well known as a major contributor to the economics profession. As the author of seminal works such as The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock, 1962), Public Principles of Public Debt (1958), The Limits of Liberty (1975), and The Reason of Rules (with Geoffrey Brennan, 1985), he was a cofounder of the field of public choice, and he was the founder of the field of constitutional economics. So important was his work that in 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics "for his development of contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic decision-making."
While most professional economists recognize the importance of Buchanan's place in late twentieth century economics, fewer are aware of another important aspect of his career. In addition to being a formidable thinker and a prolific writer, he was also an institution builder par excellence. He had a knack for creating spaces where other like-minded scholars would be eager to join him in pursuing their mutual research interests. While at the University of Virginia from 1956 through 1968, he and Warren Nutter founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy, a center that hosted some of the brightest lights in the classical liberal tradition. After publication...