1919

Born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the grandson of John P. Buchanan, erstwhile
Populist governor of Tennessee, and the son of Lila Scott and James McGill Buchanan, both of pure Scotch-Irish descent.
Grows up on the family farm in rural agricultural poverty. Since the farm had no clear-cut owner he early learns the importance of clearly defined property rights to provide the incentive for effective maintenance.
His mother and father assumed leadership roles in their local community. From his mother, who was a public school teacher, he receives home instruction that advances him two grades. She continues this help even through his college years.

1940

Graduates first in his class with a B.S. from Middle Tennessee State College where he majors in mathematics, English literature and social science and matriculates at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Meets Professor Charles P. White at Tennessee whose scholarly work habits influence his own and who instills in him the belief that there is a moral element in academic pursuits.

1941

Graduates with an M.A. in economics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Drafted into military service, undergoes officer training in New York and at Naval War College. Along with others, is subjected to overt discrimination based on favoritism for graduates of eastern establishment universities. This leads him to embrace a socialist position on social policy by virtue of which he becomes sympathetic to the possibility of politicized decision-making as the instrument by which social justice is achieved.

1941-1945

Stationed in Pearl Harbor on the operations staff of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz,
commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet and later stationed at Guam.
Awarded a Bronze Star for distinguished service.
Meets Ann Bakke who is working at Hickham Field, Oahu, with the Army Air Transport Command.
Buchanan develops a great respect for the military leaders for whom he works. Notwithstanding the urgings of important people who encourage him to stay in the military, he decides to pursue an academic career at war's end.

1945

Marries Ann Bakke in San Francisco and reports for temporary duty in New Orleans.
Proceeds to Memphis, Tennessee where he is released from Navy.

1946

Matriculates at the University of Chicago to work toward a Ph.D. in economics.
Enrolls in price theory class taught by Professor Frank H. Knight. Knight's teachings inspire the young economist to develop a skeptical attitude towards ideas and a new perspective for interpreting reality. The attitude: in the search for truth nothing and no one is sacred. The perspective: to see markets as coordinators of human interaction and a mechanism of exchange that increases utility. This leads the young Buchanan to reject the economizing-maximizing paradigm of economic orthodoxy as well as his earlier socialist views in which the political process overcomes "market failure." From this time onward his angle of vision sees market exchange as an institution than can best solve economic problems without coercion.

1948

By chance, Buchanan discovers Knut Wicksell's 1896 unknown, un-translated doctoral dissertation on taxation in the University of Chicago's Harper Library.
Translates it from the German. The message: government should not be viewed as a benevolent despot. Political outcomes are the result of the interaction of persons in varying roles acting in their self-interest. The test of efficiency in the public sector can only be guaranteed by the rule of unanimity. Reforms in economic policy therefore require a change in the rules under which political agents act.
Receives Ph.D. in economics.

1948-1951

Associate Professor to Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.

1951-1956

Professor, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.

1956

Professor of Economics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Fulbright Scholar in Italy where he reads widely and deeply in the works of the Italian masters of public finance. He discovers the Italian perspective on politics: "the state" is always viewed through the observed activities of its all-too-human agents.
Gets idea for his first singly authored book in a sudden epiphany while staying at a hotel in Rome. In his words: "The moment of enlightenment came while I was walking down the marbled stairs between floors on the occasion of mechanical failure of the lift. I treasure the memory of that moment because we rarely are able to locate the emergence of ideas so distinctly. I waxed so enthusiastic over the ‘discovery’ that I commenced writing what later became my book on stationery picked up from the hotel writing room."

1958

Publishes Public Principles of Public Debt in which he rejects the Keynesian-inspired macroaggregative approach in favor of "methodological individualism" in which individually identified utility gains and losses is the method of analysis.
This paradigm ultimately is to become the behavioral model underlying all of his future landmark contributions to his new political economy.
Gordon Tullock comes to University of Virginia as a postdoctoral research fellow. Buchanan joins forces with Tullock and together they begin to produce the first systematic exposition of the way of thinking that later came to be called "public choice."

1962

Publishes The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy co-authored with Gordon Tullock. This is his first exhibit in book form of what is now called "constitutional economics." Makes use of Buchanan’s Wicksellian emphasis on the rules within which political choices are made combined with the methodological-individualist model of analysis Buchanan pioneered in his public debt book. Tullock contributes his vision of the behavior of persons in bureaucratic roles. This work is quickly relegated to the status of a "classic." From the publication of this work the relevant issue in political economy becomes the comparison between the workings of the market, however imperfect, and the operation of its imperfect political alternative.

1963

Elected President of the Southern Economic Association. His presidential address, "What Should Economists Do?" explicitly argues for the removal of the theory of resource allocation from the center stage of economic study to be replaced by the theory of market exchange in which individually identified gains and losses in utility in the exchange process are analyzed.

1968-1969

Serves as Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, California.

1969

Accepts position as University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Named General Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice.
Publishes Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, a work that attempts to clarify the concept of opportunity cost and again reduces economic analysis to individual choice settings and in doing so defines cost in utility rather than commodity dimensions.

1971

Receives Outstanding Alumnus award from his undergraduate alma mater, Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

1975

The University of Chicago Press publishes Buchanan’s most coherent single statement of his political economy: The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. This work was stimulated by Buchanan’s growing disillusionment with the democratic process. His sanguine view of that process derived from his belief that governing authorities, under constitutional restraint, will be responsive to the preferences of the citizens. However, explosive government spending on new programs unrelated to the will of the citizenry suggests to him an unleashed Leviathan, and the turbulent, violent years of the late 1960’s after the eruption of the Vietnam war pointed toward the emergence of anarchy in civil society. This new work presents the theories that enable him to predict the operating properties of both anarchy and Leviathan.

1976

Elected as a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1980

Publishes (with Geoffrey Brennan), The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution. This work presents the formal analysis of the threat of the Leviathan state that was first raised in Limits of Liberty.

1982

Receives Honorary Doctorate, (Dr.h.c.) University of Giessen, Germany

1983

Joins the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as General Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice.

1984

Recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy.
Receives Honorary Doctorate (Dr. h.c.), University of Zurich.

1985

Teams again with Geoffrey Brennan to produce The Reason of Rules - Constitutional Political Economy, a sequel to their earlier work on taxation.

1986

Receives Nobel Prize in Economics.

1988

Honoree, "James Buchanan Day," Rutherford County, Tennessee, City of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

1988-1999

Recipient of numerous honorary doctorates.
Authors and/or edits over a dozen volumes of his work.

1999

Retrospective at the "Imaginary Museum of Modern Economics", (in cyberspace), curated by William Breit, on the occasion of James Buchanan’s 80th birthday.