In Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean insightfully examines an understudied vector of the modern conservative movement She frames her valuable contribution as an origins story.  In MacLean’s telling, her protagonist, the Nobel-prize winning economist and founder of “Public Choice” theory, James M. Buchanan is “the man who started it all” (xxi).  As she writes, In an attempt to find that master plan, to understand whose ideas were guiding this militant new approach, others attempted to link what was happening to the ideas of the celebrity intellectuals of the so-called neoliberal right….especially such avid promoters as Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Read more