MacLean explains that her thesis is the product of her unique archival work with Buchanan’s papers, and she spins from them an exciting (by the standards of intellectual history) and breathless tale of a hard-hearted son of the South aligning with segregationists and working to maintain white supremacy in response to the1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Buchanan’s work eventually caught the attention of Charles Koch, and Buchanan became the intellectual architect of “the radical right’s stealth plan for America.” His legacy is a path of Koch-funded destruction extending from Pinochet’s Chile to the North Carolina legislature.

Problem is, it’s not true.

In a long review essay that will appear in the Independent Review, MacLean’s Duke University colleague Michael Munger calls the book a work of “speculative fiction,” and we agree. The author’s credentials and the book’s positive coverage might lead the unsuspecting reader to conclude that the story is true in substance if not in every minor detail. That reader would be badly misled.

The book is filled with errors and misinterpretations that would have been easy for MacLean to avoid. Duke’s political science department is home to the current (Georg Vanberg) and two former presidents of the Public Choice Society, a group of academics devoted to the theory of government and political action that Buchanan pioneered. One of those past presidents is Geoffrey Brennan, who was Buchanan’s coauthor on some of his most influential work, like The Power to Tax and The Reason of Rules. The other past president is Munger himself, and he reports that MacLean did not contact any of the three. Duke is also home to the Center for the History of Political Economy, and its director is Bruce Caldwell, an authority on F.A. Hayek, who influenced Buchanan and helped found the Mont Pelerin Society. MacLean made no attempt to contact Caldwell. There is no evidence in Democracy in Chains to suggest that she attempted to contact any of the small army of Buchanan students and coauthors who are still active. Given David Levy and Sandra Peart’s recent book Escape from Democracy (see “The Discontented Animal,” Summer 2017)—as well as their own work with the Buchanan papers—and Richard Wagner’s new study of Buchanan, this is a surprising oversight by someone ostensibly committed to understanding Buchanan’s ideas.

MacLean’s substance and style suggest that she isn’t actually interested in understanding those ideas. Her own sources seldom if ever support her harshest allegations about Buchanan and his fellow travelers.

She makes no mention of his support for high estate taxes, for example. This put him squarely at odds with most classical liberals; it is hardly the position a flunky of the plutocracy would take, and it’s also hardly a position that plutocrats would support if they want to maintain dynasties. The tax idea isn’t central to Buchanan’s written work—it was a policy idea he floated from time to time in discussion—but it’s at odds with MacLean’s thesis and the sort of thing that would have come up in conversation if she had walked across campus to visit her colleagues or just sent them an email. This omission contradicts her portrayal of Buchanan as an agent of the ruling elite and should, we think, make us more skeptical of how she handles her evidence.

Calhoun conspirator? / MacLean’s unfamiliarity with Buchanan’s work extends into her depiction of his philosophical roots. Specifically, she devotes substantial energies to portraying him as an intellectual heir to John C. Calhoun and, more directly, the Southern Agrarians. Calhoun was infamously the leading pro-slavery theorist of the 19th century and the Agrarians—a group of scholars who led a southern literary revival in the 1930s—counted numerous segregationists in their ranks. Both examples are highly convenient to MacLean’s efforts to paint Buchanan’s reputation with the broad brushes of racism and segregation. It is helpful to recount her telling of each case to see how she connects them to Buchanan.

Early in the book, she depicts Calhoun as the “intellectual lodestar” (p. xxxii) of public choice, and she does so by citing his somewhat similar interest in the function of constitutional voting rules as a constraint upon majoritarian impulses. This observation is neither a smoking gun nor original to MacLean. A simpler, non-devious explanation is that both Calhoun and Buchanan, though writing in different eras and using dramatically different analytical tools, were both expanding upon a common source: James Madison’s theory of constitutional federalism—a theory that, it’s worth noting, is especially timely amidst today’s surge of populism and nationalism.

MacLean opts for a conspiratorial interpretation, though, in which Calhoun assumes the role of an unspoken ur-text to The Calculus of Consent. Her portrayal immediately encounters a substantial evidentiary obstacle: Buchanan does not appear to have ever cited, referenced, or commented upon Calhoun in his academic career of over half a century. He does, however, make frequent references to Madison.

Undeterred, MacLean enlists a six-degrees-of-separation game to shoehorn Calhoun into Buchanan’s system of thought. She offers an incomplete reading of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s 1992 paper, “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun,” which notes Calhoun’s and Buchanan’s distinct but sometimes similar developments of Madisonian theory, as further evidence of the conspiracy.

Perhaps aware of the flimsiness of this argument when taken alone, she next notes that the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard discussed Calhoun’s emphasis on the conflict between the taxers and the taxed in his own 1960s work. While Rothbard supposedly demonstrates a libertarian affinity for Calhoun at the time Buchanan was developing his theory, MacLean either neglects to note or—more likely—is unaware that Buchanan and Rothbard were each quite critical of the other. Rothbard in particular panned the very book that MacLean cites as an esoteric dialogue on Calhounism, writing in a commentary that “I am so out of sympathy with James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent that I don’t think a particularly detailed critique to send to them would be worthwhile.” In the end, the link that MacLean posits between Buchanan and Calhoun simply isn’t there.

Her purported linking of Buchanan to the pro-segregation Southern Agrarians is even weaker. A casual reader of her book could easily be led to believe that the Agrarian poets played a direct and formative role in Buchanan’s own intellectual journey through college and into academia. Although his lack of financial means led him to study at what was then a small public teachers college in his hometown (and today is Middle Tennessee State University), MacLean asserts that the Agrarians were “a cultural project that attracted James Buchanan” to want to attend Vanderbilt, where several of them taught. There is nothing, as far as we are aware, suggesting that Buchanan was ever “attracted” to the Agrarians’ “cultural project,” and she cites no evidence to support this contention.

Buchanan described himself as having socialistic leanings prior to encountering Frank Knight at the beginning of his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, which makes an earlier affinity for these deeply conservative literary critics unlikely. But MacLean’s argument is not rooted in any actual evidence. She claims that the Agrarian poet Donald Davidson was “the Nashville writer who seemed most decisive in Jim Buchanan’s emerging intellectual system” (p. 33). Davidson, she alleges, provided the source of Buchanan’s oft-enlisted concept of the Leviathan state in his academic writings and a recurring interpretive framework for public choice skepticism of government. Again, though, she offers no evidence to establish Davidson’s alleged influence on Buchanan.

Of course, the Leviathan metaphor derives from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. MacLean acknowledges that in passing, but then credits Davidson with introducing a “new and distinctive” use of the term to assail the growing federal government in the post–Civil War era, and particularly its intrusions upon “state’s rights” and other coded language for segregation. However, Davidson is nowhere to be found in Buchanan’s Collected Works; Hobbes, by contrast, is cited frequently. The evidence—actually, the lack of it—does not support her narrative that places Buchanan amidst the resistance to Brown v. Board.

MacLean cites Buchanan’s autobiographical collection Economics from the Outside In: “Better Than Plowing” and Beyond (originally “Better than Plowing” and Other Personal Essays) as one of her sources. Chapter 9 of the book is a collection of quotes Buchanan liked and had written down in notebooks. None of the quotes come from Calhoun, Davidson, or any of the Southern Agrarians. It isn’t because Buchanan was particularly shy about his literary tastes; in several places he mentions the poet Thomas Hardy. Indeed, there is more evidence in Buchanan’s written work and in the interviews of which we are aware to substantiate a claim that “the most decisive” writer in Buchanan’s intellectual system was western novelist Zane Grey than to substantiate MacLean’s claim about Davidson. The men who MacLean tells us are behind the curtain simply aren’t there.

MacLean’s majoritarianism / MacLean also charges that Buchanan was not an empiricist. In a narrow sense, she is correct. He employed a largely theoretical style that reasoned from starting principles, such as a constitutional rule or a stated assumption about voting behavior. From this position she leaps to the conclusion that public choice ideas are unsupported empirically. But an empirical study appears in the very first issue of the journal that became Public Choice, and Buchanan the theorist inspired legions of empiricists. In a 2012 appreciation of Buchanan that appeared in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Elinor Ostrom—a Nobel economics laureate and as fine an empiricist as there has ever been—wrote, “There is substantial empirical work now that strongly supports his ideas.” On the basis of this empirical evidence, we reject MacLean’s hypothesis that there is no empirical evidence to substantiate public choice theory.

MacLean’s own majoritarianism places her argument well outside mainstream constitutional theory. This much is particularly apparent in a lengthy tangent where she assails checks and balances as “an all but insuperable barrier to those seeking to right even gross social injustice” (p. 224). There is a grain of truth to this observation. Historical wrongs such as slavery and segregation do reveal faults in our constitutional system, but this affirms the importance of public choice contributions to understanding and ameliorating these conditions.

MacLean misses this insight, offering instead an aggressive appeal to a peculiar populism that aligns with her own redistributive politics (p. 226). The implicit rejection of a basic Madisonian principle in MacLean’s political ideal is odd given her frequent depictions of Buchanan’s constitutionalism as a conspiracy to undermine “American democracy.” Unfortunately, she offers no evidence that the populist alternative she prefers would produce better results. In fact, she glosses over the role that populist majorities played in some of the worst injustices of our history: segregation, discrimination against homosexuals, and the drug war, to name a few. These injustices speak to one of Madison’s and Buchanan’s larger points: without constitutional mechanisms to protect them from politically entrenched and powerful government actors, political minorities are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation under the cover of law.

In Buchanan’s collection of favorite quotes, none come from Calhoun, Davidson, or the Southern Agrarians. MacLean’s bogeymen aren’t there.

MacLean also interprets the classical liberal tradition in light of a false tension between capital and labor. A more sophisticated analysis—like those done by many economists, including those inspired by Buchanan—shows that (for example) labor unions increase the incomes of some workers at the expense of others. Thomas Leonard’s 2016 book Illiberal Reformers is in this sense a necessary corrective to Democracy in Chains. (See “Progressivism’s Tainted Label,” Summer 2016.) Illiberal Reformers shows the ways in which some of the very same labor market interventions that MacLean celebrates were historically motivated by explicit racists who sought to keep African-Americans, immigrants, and the poor out of the competitive workforce.

MacLean does not allow for the possibility that labor markets might have worked as competitive models predict, a possibility firmly supported by the evidence summarized by, for example, Price Fishback in a 1998 Journal of Economic Literature paper. In another example, she cites Charles Dickens (p. 97) as historical evidence for the apparent squalor of early industrial society. She should consult Deirdre McCloskey’s work or virtually any serious quantitative work that has been done by economic historians in the last half-century or more, instead of citing a novelist’s work of fiction.

Buchanan and Brown / MacLean’s enthusiasm for progressive economic policies leads her into problematic territory, given her thesis. It is no small irony that she appeals to the authority of such figures as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and John Maynard Keynes for their rejections of laissez-faire in a book aimed at painting Buchanan as a closet segregationist and racist reactionary whose ideas gained currency because of backlash against Brown. Ely, Commons, and Keynes were all outspoken eugenicists who incorporated this position into their own respective assaults on laissez-faire in human reproduction.

For a decision that was supposedly decisive to Buchanan’s intellectual program, Brown is conspicuously absent from his work. The ruling does not appear in the index to his Collected Works, nor is it discussed in Economics from the Outside In. One would expect evidence of at least some link in light of the Democracy in Chains promotional material that emphasizes the Brown angle. Munger has obtained the relevant documents MacLean cites to support this charge and he argues in his Independent Review article that they are inconsistent with her interpretation.

Attacking scholarship / MacLean criticizes the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy, the former academic center at the University of Virginia where Buchanan and many of his colleagues once worked. Indeed, it was an unorthodox place in an orthodox academy. But if we are talking about “stealth plans” to undermine ideas, she lets pass with little comment the fact that the Jefferson Center scholars were effectively pushed out as a result of a secret internal investigation finding fault not with their scholarship but with their politics. Buchanan and colleague Ronald Coase would go on to win Nobels in economics, and there is widespread agreement that another colleague, Gordon Tullock, should have won one. In a book about deep histories and conspiracies, she is remarkably uninterested in the politically oriented purge of a group that included two future Nobel laureates. Given her emphasis on funding as a litmus test for the veracity of one’s ideas, she does not mention the support Buchanan and other public choice scholars have received from (for example) the National Science Foundation.

Speaking of Tullock, she quotes the verdict that his research record was “undistinguished” when he was denied promotion to full professor at the University of Virginia. While it is true that Tullock did not have a degree in economics (and, in his telling, he only took one real economics course), he had four books to his credit by the end of 1967: The Calculus of Consent, The Politics of Bureaucracy, The Organization of Inquiry, and Toward a Mathematics of Politics, as well as three papers in the Journal of Political Economy, two in the American Economic Review, one in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and papers in Oxford Economic Papers, the Western Economic Journal (now Economic Inquiry), and other publications. “Undistinguished” is not the word we would use.

MacLean’s readings of Buchanan’s works are also fraught with trouble as scholars and commentators have recently pointed out in blog posts for Bleeding Heart Libertarians, the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog at the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her misreading of Buchanan’s paper, “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” is an example. She treats it as a repudiation of compassionate ethics and indignantly scolds Buchanan for discussing “exploitation by predators of his own species.” The paper is far more complex than this, and it isn’t really about the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan at all. (Buchanan writes that he uses the term “Samaritan” because he couldn’t think of anything better.) Rather, Buchanan analyses the structure of a general problem: no decent person likes to see other people suffer and most likely experiences a great deal of pain at another’s misfortune, but the indiscriminately benevolent give others incentives and opportunities to take advantage of them. He goes on to discuss the importance of general rules as it is often easy in the short run to simply capitulate to the difficult child or grade-grubbing student.

That MacLean misses Buchanan’s meaning—or is at least does not communicate it clearly—is evident from the way she treats a passage of his about a parent spanking a child. Here is MacLean: “Buchanan used as an analogy the spanking of children by parent: it might hurt, but it taught ‘the fear of punishment that will inhibit future misbehavior’ ” (p. 143). Now here is Buchanan:

A family example may be helpful. A mother may find it too painful to spank a misbehaving child (“This hurts me more than it does you”). Yet spanking may be necessary to instill in the child the fear of punishment that will inhibit future misbehavior. … Even when she fully discounts the effect of her current action on future choice settings, the mother may still find it too painful to spank the misbehaving child. (Collected Works of James Buchanan, vol. 1, p. 335)

From the way she portrays Buchanan throughout, one might get the impression that the person experiencing the “hurt” she describes is the misbehaving child. From Buchanan’s context, however—and what makes this such a powerful contribution—the pain is felt by the mother who does not want to experience the “short-term utility losses” that come from punishing her child even when it is to the child’s long-run benefit.

Pinochet / No exposé on the alleged free-market conspiracy would be complete without a prominent appearance from Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, a thug who in 1973 overthrew the government of the democratically elected Salvador Allende, ruled the country with an iron fist, systematically abused human rights, and later implemented free-market reforms under the supposed direction of Milton Friedman and the “Chicago Boys.” To hear MacLean tell it, Buchanan had a hand in writing Chile’s 1980 constitution under the Pinochet regime and, in Buchanan’s 1981 address to the Mont Pelerin Society, provided ideological cover for Pinochet’s anti-democratic junta government. Again, if she had taken the time to walk across campus, she would have learned a different story.

Citing work by Andrew Farrant and Vlad Tarko, Munger points out that “Buchanan had essentially no role in the writing of the Chilean Constitution and in fact was critical of the regime and its actions.” He goes on to write of that constitution:

The people of Chile needed help escaping from the military regime. A constitution must foster a move to democracy, and free and fair elections, but also avoid a military coup. It would serve no one to have had a constitution that allowed an immediate transfer of power, and a Truth Tribunal had been convened, followed by arrests of top military officers. That is frustrating, because they clearly deserved it. But the only way to get from military regime to functioning democracy was the way they did it.

MacLean spins the opposite story. At one point she accuses Buchanan of providing “in-person guidance” to the Pinochet regime (p. 157), before immediately transitioning into a list of its arrests, political assassinations, and other acts of brutality. The juxtaposition is plainly intended to tar Buchanan with those crimes, even as she has no actual evidence linking the two. Her footnotes are illustrative of the scholarly deficiencies of this chapter. To document the Pinochet regime’s brutalities she cites an assortment of easily accessible newspaper articles and secondary literature about Chile, not one of which mentions Buchanan. She then pivots to Buchanan’s attendance at a weeklong academic conference in Chile where he committed the offense of speaking to other economists who worked for the Chilean government. The “archival” finds she enlists to demonstrate this nefarious collaboration include such items as a common thank you note for a lunch at the conference (p. 161) and the fact that some of Buchanan’s books were translated into Spanish in the early 1980s (p. 157).

MacLean then pivots right back to Pinochet’s authoritarian thuggery to implicate Buchanan, by association, in the same. What she does not do, though, is perform even a cursory review of the existing literature on the tensions between the Pinochet regime and classical liberalism. John Meadowcroft and William Ruger’s 2014 article in the Review of Political Economy is an excellent starting point on this subject. In particular, it documents how Buchanan’s eschewing of politics and his individualist notion of liberty chafe with both the Pinochet regime and other classical liberals—Hayek among them—who could be legitimately criticized for negligence or credulity in their own treatments of the Chilean dictatorship. As with other examples though, MacLean appears to be fundamentally uninterested in investigating Buchanan’s ideas, let alone accurately portraying them.

Conclusion / MacLean extends no scholarly charity to Buchanan, Tullock, or the entire subfield of public choice economics. Instead, she treats them with contempt. Democracy in Chains was an opportunity for serious cross-disciplinary inquiry, but that opportunity was missed.

Instead, the book is the perfect symbol of these times, fumbling the facts and ignoring ideas in order to titillate one’s tribe, provoke the paranoid, and exclaim that The End is Nigh. The book makes no serious contribution to our understanding of public choice theory or the evolution of classical liberal ideas in the late 20th century. We fear, though, that readers will come away from critical reviews like this one even more convinced that there is an insidious conspiracy. And indeed, maybe the truth is out there. But Democracy in Chains certainly isn’t it.

Readings

• “ ‘Democracy in Chains’ Is the Perfect Book for the Age of Trump. The Reasons Why Will Surprise You,” by Art Carden. Forbes​.com, July 7, 2017.
• Escape from Democracy: The Role of Experts and the Public in Economic Policy, by David Levy and Sandra Peart. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• “Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan: On Public Life, Chile, and the Relationship between Liberty and Democracy,” by John Meadowcroft and William Ruger. Review of Political Economy 26(3): 358–367 (2014).
• Illiberal Reformers, by Thomas C. Leonard. Princeton University Press, 2016.
• James Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy: A Rational Reconstruction, by Richard Wagner. Lexington Books, 2017.
• “On the Origins and Goals of Public Choice: Constitutional Conspiracy?” by Michael Munger. Independent Review, forthcoming.
• “Operations of ‘Unfettered’ Labor Markets: Exit and Voice in American Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century,” by Price Fishback. Journal of Economic Literature 36(2): 722–765 (1998).
• “The Devil’s Fix: James M. Buchanan and the Pinochet Junta,” by Andrew Farrant and Vlad Tarko. Paper presented at 2015 Annual Meetings of the Public Choice Society.
• The Economics of Politics: The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, vol. 4, by Gordon Tullock. Liberty Fund, 2005.
• “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun,” by Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 148(4): 655–674 (1992).
• “The Soul of James Buchanan,” by Geoffrey Brennan and Michael Munger. Independent Review 18(3): 331–342 (2014).