Nancy MacLean

In 1981, MacLean completed a four-year, combined-degree, B.A./M.A program in history at Brown University, graduating magna cum laude. In 1989, she received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied under Linda Gordon. Maclean’s doctoral thesis later became her first book, published as Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994).

From 1989 to 2010 MacLean taught at Northwestern University, where she served as chairwoman of the Department of History, and as the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities. MacLean spoke in favor of and participated in the Living Wage Campaign.

In 2009, she published an open “letter of concern about [the] SEIU’s interference with UNITE–HERE”, the hotel-employees and garment-workers union, which was co-signed by other academics at Northwestern University. In defense of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), representative Javier Morillo said that MacLean and fellow signatories of the open letter had “signed onto a set of arguments without doing some [of the] research and fact-checking [that] you require, when producing work in your own fields.” Later, Morillo and Andy Stern (then SEIU-president) publicly apologized to MacLean and other academics.

In 2010, MacLean to moved to Duke University. She served as co-chair of Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina (SPNC). In 2013, MacLean participated in SPNC panels and forums held in opposition to the legislative agenda of Republican majority of the North Carolina General Assembly.

Democracy in Chains (2017)

In June 2017 MacLean published Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, focusing on the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan and his work in public choice theory, Charles Koch, George Mason University, and the libertarian movement in the U.S, who, she argues, have undertaken "a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation." According to MacLean, Buchanan represents "the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right."

Reception

Democracy in Chains, "led to an enormous, highly charged debate," mostly along partisan lines between "Team Public Choice or Team Anti-Buchanan".. In The Atlantic, Sam Tanenhaus called Democracy in Chains, “A vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.” Tanenhaus wrote that the book "is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism" and it "untangle[s] important threads in American history [...] to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South." Genevieve Valentine wrote on NPR: “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains.” George Monbiot wrote the book was "the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century." Colin Gordon called the book "a revelation, as politics and as history." MacLean was interviewed by Rebecca Onion in Slate, Alex Shephard in The New Republic, and Mark Karlin Alternet about her "remarkable" and "groundbreaking" book.

David Bernstein disputed MacLean's portrayal of Buchanan and George Mason University, where Bernstein is and Buchanan was a professor and questioned her depiction of Buchanan's influence on the libertarian movement. Jonathan H. Adler noted allegations of serious errors and misleading quotations in Democracy in Chains raised by Russ Roberts, David R. Henderson, Don Boudreaux and others. Michael Munger wrote that Democracy in Chains "is a work of speculative historical fiction" while Phil Magness argued that MacLean had "simply made up an inflammatory association" concerning Buchanan and the Southern Agrarians. Steve Horwitz argued that it was "a book that gets almost everything wrong, from the most basic of facts to the highest of theory". Brian Doherty argued, contra MacLean, that Buchanan had upbraided his colleagues who supported the Chilean dictatorship. Radley Balko argued that public choice theory was a crucial tool in his work investigating the actions of unscrupulous police and prosecutors. In response MacLean argued she was the target of a "coordinated and interlinked set of calculated hit jobs" from "the Koch team of professors who don’t disclose their conflicts of interest and the operatives who work fulltime for their project to shackle our democracy." Adler and Bernstein responded to her. Georg Vanberg noted two later private letters in which Buchanan discussed his work on school vouchers and condemned the "evils of race-class-cultural segregation."

Henry Farrell and Steven Teles wrote that "while we do not share Buchanan’s ideology ... we think the broad thrust of the criticism is right. MacLean is not only wrong in detail but mistaken in the fundamentals of her account." Similarly, Noah Smith agreed that MacLean had taken Tyler Cowen, whom he called "a staunch defender of democracy," out of context. Heather Boushey wrote that MacLean had shone "a light on important truths" but cautioned that "her overt moral revulsion at her subject can sometimes make it seem as if we’re getting only part of the picture." Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute, described himself as "in sympathy with MacLean’s characterization of the Virginia School as profoundly antidemocratic and anti-academic" and considered the book "an important warning, and it should be read by all despite its rhetorical shortcomings." Bethany Moreton of Dartmouth College called "indispensable reading [that] adds a critical storyline to the complex and multi-causal conservative counterrevolution."

Freedom Is Not Enough (2006)

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, published in 2006 by Harvard University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation, traces the ways in which civil rights activism produced a seismic shift in U.S. workplaces, from an environment in which discrimination and a "culture of exclusion" were the norm to one that accepted and even celebrated diversity and inclusion.

Reception

The book received widespread acclaim as a "superb and provocative" interpretation of civil rights history, and as an example of "contemporary history at its best.” It won seven awards, including the Taft Award for labor history and the Hurst Award for legal history. Kenneth W. Mack praised MacLean for having helped to re-integrate legal frameworks into the discussion of civil rights after it had been neglected by historians.

Behind the Mask of Chivalry (1994)

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, published in 1994, explores how some five million ordinary, white Protestant men joined the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. MacLean argued that the Ku Klux Klan was an organization “at once mainstream and extreme” that was hostile to both big government and to unionism; that Klan philosophy was anti-elitist and anti-black, but that their patriarchal stance for family values helped achieve a mass following; and that they demonstrated political affinity with the varieties of European fascism of the 1920s.

Reception

Behind the Mask of Chivalry received four scholarly awards, and reviewers said it is “a remarkable, readable, and important book,”especially for students of the American South, of African American history, and of political violence in the U.S., which is characterized by an “ambitious scope” and “graced by artful, energetic prose.” The Organization of American Historians awarded the James A. Rawley Prize to Behind the Mask of Chivalry. However, William D. Jenkins said that MacLean's historical analysis is "well-written, yet flawed", because it is "too readily dismissive of the influence of religious and cultural beliefs on human activity." In the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, J. Morgan Kousser said that "MacLean makes elementary errors long identified by sociologists and historians. Most fundamentally she has no control group" and that the history book's winning "two prestigious prizes raises a question: Does evidence matter in history anymore?"

In 1995 she received the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize from the Southern Historical Association. In 2010, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. In 2007, she received the Phillip Taft Labor History Award of the Labor and Working Class Studies Association. In 2007 she received the Allan Sharlin Book Award for the best book in social science history from the Social Science History Association. In 2007 she received the Willard Hurst Prize for best book in socio-legal history from the Law and Society Association. In 2007 she received the Labor History Best Book Prize from the International Association of Labor History Institutions.