This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 4th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If a project of intellectual history involves the life's work of a scholar who died

only recently, you might reasonably expect that historian to speak to colleagues, or at least to those who intimately understand the work.

In Nancy McClain's democracy and chains, it appears those conversations never happened.

That according to Steve Horwitz, a professor of economics at Ball State University, we spoke

this week.

Nancy McClain is clearly a good historian, right?

I mean, she, you know, you don't get a name chair at Duke without being a good historian.

So how can you produce something that has so many errors in it?

I think it's a combination of two things. I think one is the

confirmation bias idea. I mean she has her political priors. I think that she

entered this endeavor already convinced that libertarian ideas were elitist and plutarchical

and racist and all the bad words that she throws at it.

So that doesn't have to be demonstrated in her mind. That's a given.

So with that given, right, you're going to read texts in a particular kind of way and there's

the confirmation bias. But I think the other half of this story is she's just in over

her head not as a historian but sort of as a theorist as a you know as an intellectual.

Say what you want about Buchanan, Buchanan's work and the questions he's responding to are,

you know, have long historical context, they're sophisticated abstract questions, people find Buchanan

very hard to read, I do sometimes too, because he's people find you can very hard to read.

I do sometimes too because he's working at such an abstract level.

...