William C. Mitchell died January 2, 2006, at his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had suffered from pulmonary fibrosis. He was 80. His wife since 1959, Joyce Mitchell, died in 1996; he is survived by a brother James W. Mitchell, of Kingsford, Michigan, and two sisters, Jeanine Watt of Iron River, Michigan and Waverly Jarvis of Withee, Wisconsin.

Mitchell—Bill as he insisted to students, colleagues and friends—served with the 513^th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 17^th Airborne during World War II, making several combat jumps, including Operation Varsity, the largest airborne jump ever, on March 24, 1945, during the crossing of the Rhine. After the war, he completed a B.A. in economics from Michigan State University (1950), an M.A. in political science from the University of Illinois (1951), and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University (1960). He was an APSA Congressional Fellow in Washington between 1957 and 1958, where he first met Joyce Coward from Berkeley, also a Congressional Fellow, who he subsequently married. He and Joyce accepted positions in the political science department at the University of Oregon in 1960 where he was promoted to full professor in 1965. He taught there until his retirement in 1995, although with visits to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1966–1967), the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University (fall 1991), and elsewhere. In 1988 he was the first person elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the Public Choice Society.

Bill's early work took cues from one of his two great mentors at Harvard, Talcott Parsons (the other was V. O. Key). In an early paper, “The Polity and Society” (Midwest Journal of Political Science, 1959), he set out a paradigm for the structural-functional analysis of political systems. This was followed by The American Polity (The Free Press, 1962), one of the very few applications of a functionalist approach to political science, and later by an evaluation of Parson's own contributions to political science, Sociological Analysis of Politics: The Theories of Talcott Parsons (Prentice Hall, 1967).

By the time of these publications, however, Bill's own lengthy training in economics was reorienting his thinking. In 1963 he was one of a small group of economists and political scientists who met in Charlottesville, Virginia, under the auspices of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at a conference dubbed the “no name conference” by another participant, Vincent Ostrom. The goal was to develop what participants called variously “the pure theory of collective decision-making,” “the positive theory of collective agreement,” and “the theory of non-market decision making.” Eventually, at Bill's suggestion, the name “Public Choice” was accepted, the Public Choice Society was founded, and the Journal for Non-Market Decision Making morphed into Public Choice.

In 1966 Bill delivered “The Shape of Political Theory to Come: From Political Sociology to Political Economy” to an American Political Science Association panel, which also included Seymour Martin Lipset, Scott Greer, and Irving Louis Horowitz. (This was published in American Behavioral Scientist in 1968 and reprinted in Lipset's 1969 edited volume, Politics and the Social Sciences.) A companion piece entitled “The New Political Economy” was published in Social Research in 1967. These papers were not only prescient but also helped to define the new field of public choice, giving coherence to the new approach and showing how the ideas of rationality and analytic individualism, imported from economics, could be brought to bear on the study of politics.

Collaborating with his wife Joyce Mitchell, Bill wrote Political Analysis and Public Policy: An Introduction to Political Science in 1969. This was an ambitious effort to incorporate what was then understood about public choice with ideas that were then only beginning to be developed in the study of public policy (the latter being Joyce's particular forte). As Joyce and Bill both gladly admitted, the book was ahead of its time—in particular, as a textbook intended to be used in the highly competitive introductory undergraduate market. Nevertheless, many political scientists who are now leaders in the discipline no less gladly admit that the book had a profound influence on their early thinking, just as many economists are also happy to admit that they learned their political science from that text. Bill's subsequent Public Choice in America (1971) and Why Vote (1971) served similar purposes.

Still working within the rational choice analytic framework that he had helped to pioneer, Bill's work became increasingly focused on policy analysis and evaluation. His early but influential paper on social security The Popularity of Social Security: A Paradox in Public Choice (American Enterprise Institute, 1977) was published long before Social Security became the hotly debated policy issue that it now is, and his The Anatomy of Public Failure (International Institute for Economic Research, 1978, with a forward by James Buchanan), addressing the problem of governmental failure as a parallel discourse to the lengthy existing literature on market failure. He asked the question that underlay his thinking for some years to come: How efficient and equitable are political processes as contrasted with market economy processes? His answer was then, and remained, unequivocal: Political processes are basically perverse and ought not to be adopted when there is a satisfactory alternative in market-based choice. He developed the theme in several subsequent publications, including, with Randy Simmons of Utah State University, Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare and the Failure of Bureaucracy, (Westview Press, 1994). Perhaps the most signal attribute of his writing was the capacity to take complex ideas and reduce them to simple, clear and readily understandable prose. As Mike Munger, comments, Bill had a “preternatural faculty of simplifying very complex points and being able to express them graphically. He and I published two papers together, and in both cases I found his ability to make complex theory understandable to be truly remarkable.” It was also, of course, a capacity that contributed to his great classroom success throughout his career.

Two of Bill's other interests were particularly expressed in his later work. His lifelong interest in intellectual history was first expressed in his paper, with his wife Joyce, “Behavioralists and Traditionalists: Stereotypes and Self-Images” in Stephen Wasby's edited volume, Political Science: The Discipline and its Dimensions (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970). But it was expressed in more developed form in his paper, also with Joyce, “Truman's The Governmental Process: A Public Choice Perspective, Micropolitics, 3: 1983) and then, most notably, in his twin papers “Schumpeter and Public Choice, Part I: Precursor to Public Choice?” in Public Choice (1984); and “Schumpeter and Public Choice, Part II: Democracy and the Demise of Capitalism: The Missing Chapter in Schumpeter,” in Public Choice (1984). These papers placed both Schumpeter and the emerging discipline of public choice in historical perspective, showing how themes anticipated by Schumpeter were subsequently developed by public choice. Most recently in this vein, he published “The Old and New Public Choice: Chicago vs. Virginia” in William F. Shughart II and Laura Razzoline, (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Public Choice (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000).

The other interest reflected his own formidable record during World War II. Particularly toward the later phases of his career, he turned to the human costs of battle, particularly in “What Price Glory? A Comparative Study of Airborne, Infantry, and Marine Casualties in Three Wars,” U.S.A. Airborne (1940–1990: A Commemorative Volume, edited by Bart Hagerman (Battery Press, 1990). His personal experience was reflected in his analysis of group solidarity in airborne units during World War II, “Airborne We Fly the Sky—Paratroopers Do or Die: Rational Models of Group Solidarity,” CROSSROADS: A Socio-Political Journal, 1992. Bill took particular pride in having edited and completed (with an introduction and concluding chapter) a memoir of World War II experiences written by Kurt Gabel who served in Bill's own battalion and regiment, but who died before publication: The Making of a Paratrooper: Airborne Training and Combat in World War II, (University Press of Kansas, 1990). The book and Bill's contribution to it have been strongly praised by military historians, academics, and fellow paratroopers.

In his own community, Bill was a frequent commentator in, and letter writer to, Oregon's two major newspapers, the Eugene Register Guard and Oregonian—generally from a libertarian perspective, but always with that perspective informed by his background in public choice theory. He was also a patron of the visual arts, being well known in Eugene's and Oregon's artistic communities; and, of course, he was a connoisseur of good food, evidenced by his writing “Bill Mitchell's Restaurant Guide to San Francisco” for the annual meeting of the Public Choice Society in 1997. As all his friends knew, he was also a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers—and a very proud shareholder.

Joyce Mitchell was his collaborator and, as they both cheerfully acknowledged, often his most severe critic. She was also the love of his life; he saw her through her own long and difficult illness and, even after their divorce, remained her friend, supporter, and caregiver. Recovering from the heart attack he suffered after Joyce's death, he became, once again, a major daily presence in the corridors of the University of Oregon's political science department and, until only a few months before his own death, a reliable, generous, and open-minded commentator on the ideas of the many students and faculty who sought him out for reading courses, coffee, and talk. Recent students and new junior faculty, who had not known him before his retirement, discovered what earlier generations had long recognized—that he was a model of academic integrity, perspective, judgment, and enthusiasm for ideas.