It is evident from reading Democracy in Chains that MacLean takes a dim view of the economics profession. She writes scornfully about its standard assumption of rational behavior on the part of individuals and about the absence from the field of any notion that social power of the rich over the poor determines social outcomes. It would be reasonable for the reader to assume that MacLean does not know many economists, and those she does know, she does not like. I would go so far as to say the book starts from the assumption that economists would be a hostile audience no matter what it says, and hence it is not worth constructing an argument that might appeal, or even make sense, to them.
That is a shame, because MacLean does have quite a lot to say to economists that they do not already know and, given the tone of the book, that they are unlikely to believe solely on her authority. Namely, that foundational elements of their field arose out of a backlash to both the New Deal and the civil rights movement. Each of those political watersheds was built on the public pressure brought by small-d democratic social movements—movements that forced the government to intervene against the interests of a wealthy elite in order to deconstruct the existing hierarchy. MacLean shows how the building blocks of the neoclassical revolution in economics research, especially Buchanan’s work around Public Choice (a theory that uses economic tools to address political decision-making), were born from the backlash to these “big government” or “collectivist” “interventions.” Indeed, the new history that MacLean brings forward, and that Bethany Moreton’s review in this journal expands on, is that Buchanan and his Virginia research institutes were at the center of the political and academic architecture of white supremacy in the 1950s and ’60s. MacLean overstates the centrality of Buchanan and his “Virginia School” of Public Choice as the vanguard of the broad free market economics backlash to the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but she is not wrong that that was its aim and that this essentially political motivation had a profound effect on its scholarly trajectory and its intellectual legacy.