Buchanan’s penetrating analyses of how incentives guide government action would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. That award was the supreme vindication of his intellectual achievement. But the other Buchanan, the deeply political foot soldier of the right, experienced mounting despair. His attempts to win passage of radical proposals in Virginia in the late 1950s failed miserably, because legislators understood what at first he did not: the unpopularity of his political-economic vision.
