The Birth of the Virginia School

Abstract

The establishment of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy in the University of Virginia at Charlottesville was a realization of the idea of two graduate students for reviving the classic political economy. Since then, Buchanan and Nutter jointly worked for recruiting faculty members, calling over many famous but not-mainstream scholars, constructing curriculum for graduate students and raising funds to realize their research and education programs. With the arrival of Gordon Tullock to the Center as the first post-doctoral fellow, Buchanan's interest in research program was changed towards inquiry into the political behavior of individuals and the government itself. Their publication of The Calculus of Consent was genuinely ground-breaking for the birth of the Virginia School and Public Choice. Successive publications of works by Buchanan and Tullock on public choice along with the start of the Public Choice Conference and the journal, Public Choice, made Virginia School as the center of public choice studies around the world and deepened the methodological understanding of methodological individualism, rational behavior of individuals and politics as exchange.