James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) was a prolific scholar. Over six decades, he wrote many monographs and hundreds of papers. Twenty volumes of his collected works were published by the Liberty Fund at the turn of the millennium (Brennan, Kliemt, and Tollison 1999–2002). Buchanan did not actively engage in politics, but he was an academic institution builder: he cofounded the Thomas Jefferson Center (TJC) at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1957, then the Center for the Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech in 1969, which he moved in 1983 to George Mason University, where it is still located today. The questions Buchanan and his colleagues asked, and the methods they used to answer them, led fellow travelers to speak of a distinct Virginia school of political economy within the broader public choice research community. The identity of the school was the subject of a recent volume by David...
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