In James M. Buchanan’s autobiography Better than Plowing, he offers a fascinating late-life reflection on a subject that he refers to as the country aesthetic. The discussion occurs in the 8th chapter of the book, which is about his reflections on life in old age. It’s a fascinating read and tells how Buchanan – at the […]
One of the most inflammatory charges of Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains holds that James M. Buchanan, and by extension his department and research center at the University of Virginia, served as something of an intellectual buttress to the segregationist forces of 1950s and 1960s Virginia politics after Brown v. Board. MacLean has very little
Nancy MacLean’s segregationist sins of omission…and commission Read More »
In my last post I documented how Nancy MacLean, the author of the new book Democracy in Chains, misused evidence to depict a non-existent intellectual debt between the economist James M. Buchanan and a group of pro-segregation Agrarian poets from Vanderbilt University. MacLean’s primary purpose in doing so was to prop up her own narrative, which
If you read Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains, you will probably come away thinking that the late economist James M. Buchanan believed himself to be something of an intellectual heir to the Vanderbilt Agrarians of the 1930s. According to MacLean, these now-obscure southern literary figures were a main reason Buchanan wanted to go