Karl Jacoby, a professor of history at Columbia University who also has called public attention to MacLean’s case, said libertarians’ attacks on those who disagree with them are nothing new. But what makes MacLean’s case important “is the precedent that it sets,” he said via email. “If the current critiques end up undermining her book, it will embolden libertarian/conservatives to adopt similar tactics next time someone writes a history that calls into question some of the accepted tenets of their movement.”
As for questions some have raised about MacLean’s academic integrity in asking supporters to police online book reviews, Jacoby said authors try to “game” the Amazon review process all the time. It may be “something of a moral grey area,” he added, “but it is certainly not a major violation of ethics. It’s not as if she was interfering in the academic review process.”
Jacoby emphasized that debate about scholars’ historical methods is welcome. Yet the critiques of Democracy in Chains he’s read so far “have not grappled with these questions of historical method — perhaps not surprising, since almost all come from non-historians.” To say that MacLean’s selectively quotes from Buchanan’s writings, as Munger does, for example, “is a meaningless critique: all historians distill out key quotes from an otherwise vast body of documents. Similarly, Munger’s assertions that one has to exhibit ‘charity’ towards one’s subject and take their writings at face value would seem laughably naive to most historians.”
Tony Forde, a spokesperson for Viking, said via email that both MacLean and the publisher were declining comment on attacks on her credibility, “in hopes that they remain in their respective spheres, and we can reassert focus on the book itself. … We’re hoping to keep the attention on the book itself and the history it reveals, rather than the attacks that have appeared online.”
Anyone who has ever followed the far right movement in this country isn't a bit surprised with what MacLean's book reveals. The only new part of her book concerns James M. Buchanan. Everything else is common knowledge.
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When I was young, street harassment happened to me very often. Approaching my senior years, it almost never happens anymore, thank God. It tapered off once I hit around 35 or 40 and all but disappeared after age 50.
What this kind of thing is really about is women daring to go in public spaces alone, which are seen as for men only.
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