...Democracy in Chains is primarily a trimmed-down intellectual and political biography of James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a principal founder of public choice theory, which involves the systematic application of modes of economic analysis to political decision-making....
...Wherever he went, Buchanan attracted numerous students with a libertarian, market-oriented bent. Collectively their work established public choice as a serious school of political economy that everyone needs to reckon with one way or another. But in MacLean’s larger story, the critical moment came in the mid-1990s when Buchanan formed a working alliance with Charles Koch, who appears here as the ruthless, manipulative, domineering éminence grise of the radical right. In her account, Buchanan finally provided Koch with the fully articulated ideology he needed to rationalize his own political preferences.
Once MacLean forges the Koch-Buchanan connection, Democracy in Chains begins to read more like Ramparts-style journalism than academic history. The great goal of Koch’s movement would involve curtailing the public regulation of economic activity—or more specifically, capitalism itself—at every level of governance. Its ultimate objective, some of us suspect, is to secure the adoption of a balanced budget amendment to the US constitution, a policy-oriented renunciation of authority that would cripple the capability of the federal government to pursue the general welfare of the American people.
MacLean’s journalistic turn gives her book an admirable polemical vigor that makes it fun to read—especially for anyone who has never read Ayn Rand and is free from libertarian leanings or radical-right credentials. But as a serious intellectual history of public choice ideas or (more to the point) of Buchanan’s own substantial oeuvre, Democracy in Chains is disappointing....
...Nancy MacLean has been taking numerous hits ever since her book appeared in June. (Everyone knows how to google these responses, but one finder’s clue would be to use “Volokh Conspiracy Nancy MacLean.”) Serious charges about her misuse of sources have already been made, which I will not discuss because they lie beyond my scholarly competence and knowledge. At some point there should be a thorough scholarly review of these points, and one suspects that MacLean will have to make a more concerted effort to justify her argument than she has yet provided....