James McGill Buchanan was born on October 3, 1919 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he attended local schools, earning a B.A. in 1940 from Middle Tennessee State College (Boettke and Coyne 1). He went on to earn a M.S. from the University of Tennessee and after serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1948. He spent most of his career as a university teacher and is widely recognized for having established the Center for the Study of Public Choice, first, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and later at George Mason University (Boettke and Coyne 1).
Buchanan described himself as a libertarian socialist who converted to classical liberalism after having been influenced by the price theory espoused by Frank Knight while he studied under Knight at the University of Chicago. It was there that he also encountered Knut Wicksell's principle of just taxation and embarked on a lifelong project of integrating these intellectual influences into his won theory of Public Choice (Buchanan 1). Buchanan credited Knight with providing him with a basic economic theory framework while arguing that Wicksell helped him to learn that "politics needs to be understood in an exchange framework. Efficiency in the public sector would be guaranteed only under a rule of unanimity for collective choices" (Boettke and Coyne 1).
From Frank Knight, Buchanan claims to have learned "the message that there exists no God whose pronouncements deserve elevation to the sacrosanct, whether God within or without the scientific academy. Everything, everyone, anywhere, anytime - all is open to challenge and criticism" (Formaini 1). Knight was therefore extremely influential in shaping the attitudes of Buchanan and may also have been one of the reasons why Buchanan perceives himself as an outsider in the field of economics. According to Robert Formaini (2), Buchanan considers himself to be an outside...