Trees Do Not Vote: Gordon Tullock’s Case for Democracy Unchained?

The various earlier published and unpublished draft manuscripts that ultimately culminated in the publication of David Levy and Sandra Peart’s (2020) careful and detailed investigation of the evolution of the Virginia School’s advocacy of an “economics of natural equals” were underway long before anyone had heard of the subsequent controversy over Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains (MacLean, 2017).¹ Nonetheless, while Levy and Peart (2020) describe their work as a “documentary history … [and] offer an interpretation of the documents by offering a thread that connects them” (xv), they similarly acknowledge that the “documents can support other interpretations” (xv). Accordingly, it is important to note that Levy and Peart (2020) readily agree with the view that James M. Buchanan expressed when he participated in a particularly memorable 2004 Peart–Levy organized Summer Institute “discussion with his old friend and debating partner, Warren Samuels … [i.e.,] other people have different points of view and we have an obligation to try to see things their way” (xv). Indeed, Levy and Peart’s (2020) careful engagement with Nancy MacLean’s (2017) assessment of the various documents and primary source material (e.g., the highly controversial late 1950s Nutter–Buchanan paper on “Universal Education”) that Levy and Peart (2020) similarly evaluate (and helpfully reprint) in “Natural Equals” provides ample testimony to the weight they place on the necessity to adhere to the Smithian “principle Buchanan defended” (xv).²