Duke historian Nancy MacLean made waves in 2017 with her book Democracy in Chains, a fantastical conspiracy drama that recasts James Buchanan, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics, as a crypto-segregationist bent on undermining American democracy. The problem,…
Humankind’s propensity to act selfishly is taken to be an important problem in political theory: an impediment, perhaps, to the utopian dreams of political philosophers. State-organized collectivization is often wrongly believed to provide a way out of the cycle of…
Among the many questions that marked the 2016 election and its result, perhaps the one that dominated was how the U.S. government can best help American consumers, manufacturers, and workers. Merely to ask this question is to invite the artfully…
The disciplines we call the “hard sciences” such as chemistry and physics inhabit the cold, sterile world of laboratories, uncontaminated by a boundless assortment of potential impurities. Today, economics pretends to be one of the hard sciences, yet the laboratories…
It may be hard for many Americans to hear, but politics has most likely blinded them, obscuring their view of significant facts and all but blacking out the portion of their brains devoted to critical thinking. As law professor Ilya…
Summarizing The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington’s controversial mid-17th century work of political theory, Daniel Webster wrote that “power naturally and necessarily follows property.” A free society, Harrington argued, requires that property may be owned and alienated by all citizens,…