Nancy MacLean (b. 1959) is an American historian of the twentieth-century United States whose scholarship treats the relationship among democracy, inequality, race, labor, and organized political power. She built her reputation on studies of White resistance to civil rights, the integration of the American workplace, and the intellectual roots of modern libertarianism. Through archival research, public engagement, and intervention in current political debate, she has worked to explain how institutions, ideas, and organized interests set the limits of democratic participation. She holds the title of William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Public Policy at Duke University, a status she took up in 2025.
MacLean studied at Brown University, where she finished a combined bachelor’s and master’s program in history and graduated magna cum laude in 1981. She earned a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 under the feminist historian Linda Gordon (b. 1940). Her graduate years fell within a period of upheaval in the historical profession, when social history, labor history, women’s history, and African American history pressed against older narratives built around political elites. Gordon’s influence shaped her lasting concern with how institutions distribute power and how social movements challenge a settled hierarchy.
Her first book grew straight from her doctoral research. In Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994), she examined the Klan of the 1920s through a close study of Athens, Georgia. She rejected the portrait of the Klan as a band of rural cranks and social outcasts. Many members, she argued, came from the lower middle class: small proprietors, clerks, and skilled tradesmen who felt pressed by modernization, corporate consolidation, labor militancy, immigration, and the widening opportunities open to Black Americans. The book reshaped scholarly understanding of the Second Klan by stressing its social roots and its appeal among respectable townsmen rather than fringe radicals. It won a string of honors, among them the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize from the Southern Historical Association, along with prizes in labor and legal history. The themes it opened recur across her career: the link between social anxiety and political mobilization, the institutional roots of exclusion, and the part organized movements play in defending an existing order.
After her doctorate MacLean joined Northwestern University, where she taught from 1989 to 2010. Over more than two decades she became a leading scholar of twentieth-century American social and political history. She chaired the History Department and held the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship in the Humanities. Her years at Northwestern also drew her into labor and living-wage campaigns on campus, work that sharpened her interest in the meeting point of academic inquiry and public life. In 2010 she moved to Duke University as William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy. At Duke she founded and directed the Center for the Study of Class, Labor, and Social Sustainability, a venture that carried forward her long commitment to tying historical scholarship to current questions of economic justice and democratic governance.
Her second major project turned to the transformation of the American workplace after the civil rights revolution. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006), published by Harvard University Press with the Russell Sage Foundation, examined the enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the deep changes it brought to employment across the country. The book traced how Black Americans, women, Latinos, and other long-excluded groups gained entry to occupations closed to them for generations. MacLean argued that workplace integration ranks among the underappreciated achievements of the civil rights era. She held at the same time that these gains drew heavy political backlash, and that opposition to affirmative action, equal-employment rules, and government action in labor markets fed the rise of modern conservatism. The book joined labor history, civil rights history, legal history, and political history in a single account of how American democracy changed. It drew the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, the Allan Sharlin Award in social science history, and the Willard Hurst Prize in socio-legal history, all in 2007.
Across these works MacLean developed a method that blended social, political, and intellectual history. Rather than confine herself to elected officials and formal institutions, she examined networks of activists, donors, business leaders, academics, and political organizations. Her scholarship traces how ideas become policy and how organized groups try to shape the rules that govern economic and political life. This focus on institutions and concentrated power places her within a tradition of historians who study how inequality survives or gives way.
She also reached past the conventional monograph. In 2014 she co-edited Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism with Edward H. Peeples, a book that joined memoir, oral history, and historical analysis. The work fit her long interest in how a man raised inside a racial order comes to reject it and turn advocate.
Her most influential and most contested book is Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017). The project began in research on Virginia’s campaign of Massive Resistance against school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. While studying the closure of public schools in Prince Edward County, MacLean took an interest in the economist James M. Buchanan (1919-2013), founder of public choice theory and a future Nobel laureate. After Buchanan’s death she gained access to his papers at George Mason University and found material she read as evidence of a long campaign.
In Democracy in Chains MacLean argued that Buchanan built an intellectual framework designed to limit the power of democratic majorities and to shield property rights from popular political demand. She traced the path of these ideas from segregation-era Virginia through later libertarian movements and the organizations tied to the businessman Charles Koch (b. 1935). On her account, a long-term political project took shape that sought to fence off economic decisions from majority rule through constitutional restriction, privatization, judicial protection, and rules that hold popular politics at a distance. One of her sharpest claims concerned the proximity between Buchanan’s early work and the efforts of Virginia elites to resist federally ordered integration; she read his constitutional political economy as offering tools that could narrow the reach of majoritarian politics, and she presented this link as an overlooked chapter in the intellectual history of modern conservatism.
The book reached a wide audience. It became a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Book Award, took the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award, reached the New York Times bestseller list, and drew The Nation’s naming of it as Most Valuable Book of the year. Few historical monographs in recent decades have drawn comparable public attention.
The reaction ran hot. Economists, political scientists, libertarian scholars, and some historians mounted long critiques. Georg Vanberg, Michael Munger, David Schmidtz, and Phillip W. Magness argued that MacLean misread central parts of public choice theory, quoted archival material selectively, and overstated the continuity from mid-century segregationist politics through Buchanan’s thought to present-day libertarian organizations. They held that public choice grew from economic analysis of political incentives rather than from a defense of segregation. The political theorists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, who share none of Buchanan’s politics, called the book a conspiracy theory dressed as intellectual history and judged the broad thrust of the criticism sound. MacLean and her defenders rejected these readings. They argued that the book correctly named the anti-majoritarian strain in important currents of libertarian thought and drew real connections among arguments, donor networks, and institutions. Supporters read the heat of the attack as a measure of the political stakes. The exchange became a visible scholarly controversy of the new century, turning on archival interpretation, intellectual history, ideology, and the duties of historians who write about live political movements.
After 2017 MacLean carried these themes into articles, essays, lectures, and public commentary. Her later work has examined the global reach of libertarian political economy, the tie between privatization and racial inequality, the roots of school-choice movements, and the influence of corporate-funded policy networks. She has argued that current fights over voting rights, judicial power, administrative governance, and public education carry roots that run back decades.
She has stayed active as a public intellectual. She co-founded Scholars for North Carolina’s Future, the successor to Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina, and has taken part in public arguments over voting rights, labor rights, public education, privatization, and democratic institutions. Like many historians shaped by the social history of the late twentieth century, she treats scholarship as a way to light up present struggles as well as to reconstruct the past.
Her central concern stays consistent across more than three decades. Whether she writes about the Ku Klux Klan, workplace discrimination, segregationist resistance, or libertarian constitutional theory, she returns to one question: how organized groups hold influence against rising demands for equality and democratic participation. Admirers count her a leading historian of democracy, race, and inequality in modern America. Critics hold that her political commitments at times push her to overstate the coherence and the intent of the movements she studies. Even many critics grant that she has forced scholars and the public to face hard questions about the bond among wealth, power, institutions, and self-government. Few living historians have done more to set the history of political ideas in direct conversation with present debate.
The public, in her account, has been fooled. Ordinary people back the policies that gut their own unions, schools, and votes because they cannot see the hand behind the curtain. They need the curtain pulled. This is the misunderstanding myth restored at the bottom of the hierarchy after she banished it from the top. The masses do not understand their interest. A historian will explain it to them. Pinsof has a line for this move. Capitalism, false consciousness: if only the workers knew how much they were exploited, they would unite. MacLean offers the same structure with better footnotes.
Her own coalition gets a third treatment. The right acts from actual motives, naked and documented. The public acts from confusion. But the people who oppose the right act from their stated motives, and she leaves those motives alone. They defend democracy. They protect the vulnerable. They follow the evidence where it leads. Pinsof’s first instruction reads the deeds and not the mission statement. MacLean reads the deeds of her enemies and the mission statement of her friends.
The frame asks what her friends might want if we read them as she reads Koch. The answer sits in her own subject. She writes about the fight to control the state. Pinsof says that fight is what partisan conflict has always been, a zero-sum struggle over the machine that puts people in prison at gunpoint. MacLean describes that struggle in detail. She names the donors, the think tanks, the long game. Then she narrates her own side as though it stood outside the struggle, wanting only fairness while the other side wants power. The symmetry she will not grant is the plain one. Both coalitions want the state. Both understand this. Her book is a weapon in the war it claims to expose.
Consider the role the story builds for her. If the right runs a stealth plot against democracy, then the scholar who finds the plot in the archive saves democracy by the act of finding it. The work and the heroism become the same gesture. This is the payoff Pinsof identifies in the misunderstanding myth, the reason intellectuals love it. It makes them the most important people in the room. MacLean reaches the payoff by a different road. She does not say the right misunderstands. She says the right deceives, and that the historian who exposes the deception performs a public rescue. The savior survives the move from misunderstanding to conspiracy. Only the costume changes.
The reception of the book settles the question in Pinsof’s favor rather than hers. Economists and political scientists charged that she misread Buchanan, quoted him out of context, and stitched a plot from loose thread. Historians on her side defended the reading. The lines held by coalition. Almost no one crossed. If the quarrel were a misunderstanding, better archival work might resolve it, and the sides might converge. They did not converge, because the quarrel is not about Buchanan’s sentences. It is about which coalition gets to narrate the origins of the present order. The split runs along coalition lines because the participants read their interests well. They are not failing to understand each other. They understand each other and fight.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
MacLean’s books form a catalogue of tribe beating creed, and she narrates each victory as a scandal.
Look at her subjects. The Second Klan draws five million White Protestant men who feel their group losing ground. Massive Resistance closes the schools of Prince Edward County rather than seat Black children beside White ones after Brown v. Board of Education. The backlash she traces in the integrated workplace pits one group’s gain against another’s standing. The Buchanan project she pursues across the Koch archive defends a coalition that fears the unleashed majority. Each case shows a group choosing its own survival and rank over the universal claim of equal rights. MacLean reads each case as a pathology, a wound in the body of democracy, a thing to diagnose and cure. Mearsheimer reverses the polarity. The tribe protecting itself is the baseline of human conduct. The universal creed is the late and fragile overlay. If he is right, her whole shelf documents the rule and keeps calling it the exception.
MacLean thinks tribalism intrudes on a democratic order that would otherwise hold. Mearsheimer thinks the democratic order floats as a thin film on a tribal deep. She has written the same surprised story many times about an outcome that was never a surprise. Men defended their group. Men have always defended their group. The puzzle she keeps posing, why the arc bends back toward exclusion, dissolves once you grant that the arc was never bending the way she assumed.
Her faith in the majority runs into the same rock. She trusts the democratic many and blames the constraints that the right places on majority rule. Let the people govern free of the donor class, she argues, and they choose fairness. Her own first book unsettles the hope. The majority of White Athens joined the Klan. The demos she trusts is the demos that built the hood. Mearsheimer asks the question she steps around: why assume the unleashed majority bends toward her justice rather than toward its tribe? Strip away the checks and the people might choose the creed of equal rights, or they might choose their own. The record she assembled gives the gloomy answer more often than the bright one.
Her method takes a hit too. She presents her conclusions as the residue of evidence, the archive read close and followed where it leads. Mearsheimer ranks reason below socialization and innate sentiment in the forming of a moral code. A historian trained inside the social-history insurgency, raised in the academic class, settled in a progressive coalition, absorbs that coalition’s sense of right and wrong long before she weighs it. The value infusion comes first. By the frame’s logic her universalism is the badge of her tribe, the mark that shows which group she belongs to, worn by a member who takes the badge for a description of all mankind.
The crusade follows from the creed. Liberalism, once it holds power, turns intolerant of those who reject its universal rights and treats them as enemies of humanity rather than as a rival people. That logic sends liberal states abroad to remake other nations and ends in long wars. The same logic turns the liberal scholar into a crusader at home. MacLean’s opponents are no rival coalition with interests of their own. They are a stealth plot against democracy as such, architects of a design to undo the universal. A frame that grants the other side honor cannot survive in the crusading mind, because the universal admits no honorable dissent, only heresy. Her portrait of Buchanan as a cold engineer of oligarchy is the demonization Mearsheimer predicts the universalist will reach for.
So what then for MacLean, if Mearsheimer is right here? Her universalism becomes a dream rather than a map. Her enemies become ordinary men doing the ordinary work of their group rather than monsters outside the human run. Her hope that equal rights can defeat entrenched group loyalty runs against the order of the forces that move men, with reason last and the tribe first. She has spent a working life writing the refutation of her own faith and reading it as the proof.
MacLean has called herself an archival rat. The name fits the posture, the patience, the nose for the one folder in a long run that turns the whole story over.
This is a scene of devotion. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) has a word for what she is doing.
Becker argued that every man builds a hero system, a scheme of meaning that tells him how to count, how to be of use, how to win a place in something that outlasts the body.
MacLean’s hero system makes her a sentinel of democracy. That is the holy word. Around it her cosmos turns. A teaching career alone will not earn the standing the scheme demands, and a monograph that ages on a shelf will not hold off the dark. The work has to bend the present. She has to find the plot, name the architect, and bind her own name to the rescue. The box at George Mason is the altar where that happens. When she lifts the lid she is not gathering data. She is reaching for the deed that will let her matter after she is gone.
Set a second man at a second desk, three decades earlier, in Virginia. He handles the same papers from the writing end. To him the word democracy names the thing he fears, the many voting away what belongs to the few, the crowd reaching for his purse and his school and his peace. His sacred word is liberty, the self fenced off from the mob. His hero system makes him the lone clear mind who sees what the herd cannot, who designs the rules that guard the reasoning few against the appetites of the mass. He earns his immortality by building chains for the beast and calling the chains freedom. Two people, two altars, one archive. Each takes the other’s holy word for a curse.
Becker’s point is that the word carries the whole cosmos with it, and the cosmos differs from stall to stall. Put democracy to a Trappist in his choir stall and it weighs nothing. It is a noise from the city. His sacred is obedience, the rule, the long silence, the surrender of the will. Salvation is not put to a vote. Put the word to a staff sergeant at Camp Pendleton and he nods at the recruiting poster and then forgets it, because the holy thing for him is the man on his left and the man on his right. He will die for the fire team. The franchise is for speeches. Put the word to a young engineer in Menlo Park who means to route human judgment around the slow and the foolish, and democracy becomes a faulty input device, a thing to be modeled and corrected by the smart hands that see the curve. The sacred for him is the optimum and the future it serves. Put the word to a grandmother in Calabria and she waves at the television where men in suits shout. The sacred sits at her table, in the blood, in the name her grandsons will carry. Five altars, five readings of one word, and on each altar a different act counts as heroism. MacLean treats democracy as the redeeming cause of a human life. The economist treats it as the disease. The monk, the sergeant, the engineer, the grandmother file it under noise, or duty, or inefficiency, or nothing. The word does not hold still, because the hero system underneath it does not hold still.
A hero system runs on a subtraction. Becker named the deep one, the denial of the body, the refusal to know oneself as meat that rots. MacLean’s scheme runs a subtraction of its own. For democracy to stay the one sacred thing in the room, the dead economist has to have no altar. He has to be an engineer of chains and nothing more, a cold designer with cunning and no reverence. Her book grants him intelligence on every page and withholds from him an inner faith. She cannot let him be a man defending his own holy thing, because a rival faith is a tragedy, and tragedy would dim the clean light her cause throws. So she subtracts his soul to keep her own cause spotless. She subtracts a second thing nearer home. The hunger that drove her to the box, the need to outlast herself, the wish to be the one whose name attaches to the rescue, she reads as service. The drive to matter wears the robe of selflessness, and the robe hides the drive from the woman wearing it.
Does she know? The phrase archival rat shows a little play, a little distance, a writer who can see herself bent over the foam cradle and smile. The play stops at the edge of the cause. She knows she is a partisan for democracy and she wears the badge with pride. She does not show the further knowledge, that her democracy is an immortality project, that the heat in her prose is the heat of a believer at the rail, that the man she hunts kept an altar too. Her self-awareness reaches her politics and halts before her metaphysics.
Three coordinates fix her in Becker’s scheme. Her hero is the archival rat as guardian of the republic, the scholar who saves self-government by dragging the plot into the light and who steps thereby into the line of historians who armed the people against the rich. Immortality by exposure. The rival she fights without naming is not the economist, whom she names on every page, but his faith, the rival hero system she battles while calling it only a conspiracy, since a conspiracy can be beaten and a faith can only be mourned, and the refusal to see the faith is the move that lets her win. The one cost her ledger cannot price is her own need to endure. She can audit the donors’ money and the economist’s footnotes to the dollar and the comma. She cannot audit the hunger that chose the shape of the book, because to price it would melt the selflessness the whole scheme runs on. The vital lie at the center of her work is not about Buchanan. It is about why she went to the box.
The room stays cold. The pencil moves. She turns the next page in the run, certain she is reading a dead man’s secret, and she is, and she is also writing, in that careful hand, the terms of her own bid against the grave.
