James M. Buchanan was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1919. Economist driving the economic theory of public choice.

In 1940, he graduated from the Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, finishing in 1941, his Master's Degree in Economics at the University of Tennessee.

After enlisting in the Navy during World War II, in 1948 he received his economic doctorate at the University of Chicago, beginning as an associate professor at the University of Tennessee and becoming a professor of economics in 1950, from where he moved to Florida State University until 1956. During this period, he lived for a year in Italy, studying his traditions in public finances and when he returned to the United States, he founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression from the University of Virginia, where he promoted, with Gordon Tullock, the economic current of public choice. After a year at the University of California (UCLA) in 1968, he moved his Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC) to George Mason University in Washington.

In 1986, Professor Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions on the theory of public choice, where he published extensively on public finances, constitutional economics and libertarian theory.

Publications:

• Public Principles of Public Debt, 1958
• Fiscal Theory and Political Economy, 1960
• Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, 1962
• Cost and Choice, 1969
• Liberty, Market and State, 1985