Abstract Honoring James Buchanan is an honor and a privilege. I review the influence of his work on my own research and that of colleagues associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. The Calculus of Consent helps to explain the capabilities and limits of citizen self-organization and led to a number of studies in metropolitan areas across the United States. In more recent years, efforts to understand how and when users of a common-pool resource would self-organize to manage resources have also been strongly affected by Buchanan's work.