Growing up with The Calculus of Consent

Excerpt

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. …