James M. Buchanan was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for "his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the the ory of economics and political decision making." He was vice president of the American Economic Association in 1971.

Buchanan and Gordan Tullock are the founder's of public choice theory. According tho Buchanan, there are two levels of public choice: The initial level at which a constitution is chosen, and the post-constitutional level. He believes that the stu dy of economics should focus on the first level.

During his time as a graduate student of economics at the University of Chicago, his ideological stance regarding economics shifted dramatically, (from "libertarian socialist" to lassez faire zealot), due to a price theory class taught by economist, Frank Knight.

The following is an excerpt written by Buchanan in ,"Eminent Economists; Their Life Philosophies":

"...Yet the public's image of me, and especially as developed through the media after the Nobel Prize in 1986, is that of a right-wing libertarian zealot who is anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anit-scientific. I am, of course, none of these and am, indeed, the opposites. Properly understood, my position is both democratic and egalitarian, and I am as much a scientist as any of my peers in economics. But I am passionately individualistic, and my emphasis on individual liberty does se t me apart from many of my colleagues whose mind-sets are mildly elitist and, hence, collectivist. And to these colleagues, I can never be forgiven for having contributed to the development of a subdiscipline, public choice, that has exposed the opera tion of collectivist political institutions to serious scrutiny for the first time in well over a century."