Gordon Tullock: Entrepreneur of public choice

When Gordon Tullock first encountered James M. Buchanan, in 1957 as an initial step in his transition from the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of State to the Ivy League atmosphere of the University of Virginia, he carried with him "a voluminous manuscript on bureaucracy that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to publish" (Buchanan, 1987a: 11). Although eight years would pass before that manuscript eventually would be published, three years after publication of The Calculus of Consent (1962), Tullock's pioneering instincts already had directed him to the as-yet uncharted path of public choice, already had alerted him to the ubiquitous presence of homo economicus in the marketplace of politics. Buchanan quickly recognized the potential importance of combining Tullock's insight with his own Wicksellian notion of the importance of consent in political process as the basis for a radical research program trespassing across the traditional boundaries of economics and politics. Ignoring Tullock's lack of formal training in economics, Buchanan installed him in The Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and thereby provided that crucially important initial support absent which many a potential entrepreneur has failed to fulfill his talent. Steadfast in this judgment and firm in his resolve, Buchanan later was to gamble his own career, together with the future of the Virginia School of Political Economy, in a 1968 "exodus from Charlottesville" as the left-leaning, ideologically activist bureaucracy of Thomas Jefferson's academy thrice denied Tullock a well-earned promotion to full professor (Breit, 1986). Buchanan's judgment was sound, and the Virginia School reemerged unscathed and fortified, as Buchanan and his protege regrouped in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to carry the baton of the Virginia public choice research