Behind the Mask of Chivalry (1994)

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, published in 1994, explores how some five million ordinary, white Protestant men joined the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. MacLean argued that the Ku Klux Klan was an organization "at once mainstream and extreme" that was hostile to both big government and to unionism; that Klan philosophy was anti-elitist and anti-black, but that their patriarchal stance for family values helped achieve a mass following; and that they demonstrated political affinity with the varieties of European fascism of the 1920s.^[10]

Behind the Mask of Chivalry received four scholarly awards, and reviewers said it is "a remarkable, readable, and important book",^[11] especially for students of the American South, of African American history, and of political violence in the U.S., which is characterized by an "ambitious scope" and "graced by artful, energetic prose."^[12] The Organization of American Historians awarded the James A. Rawley Prize to Behind the Mask of Chivalry. William D. Jenkins called MacLean's historical analysis "well-written, yet flawed", because it is "too readily dismissive of the influence of religious and cultural beliefs on human activity."^[13] In the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, J. Morgan Kousser offered a critical review, saying that "MacLean makes elementary errors long identified by sociologists and historians".^[14]

Freedom Is Not Enough (2006)

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, published in 2006 by Harvard University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation, traces the ways in which civil rights activism produced a seismic shift in U.S. workplaces, from an environment in which discrimination and a "culture of exclusion" were the norm to one that accepted and even celebrated diversity and inclusion.

The book received praise as a "superb and provocative" interpretation of civil rights history, and as an example of "contemporary history at its best."^[15] It won seven awards, including the Taft Award for labor history and the Hurst Award for legal history. Kenneth W. Mack praised MacLean for having helped to reintegrate legal frameworks into the discussion of civil rights after it had been neglected by historians.^[16][17]

Democracy in Chains (2017)

In 2017 MacLean published Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. The book focuses on the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan and his work developing public choice theory, as well as the roles of Charles Koch and others in nurturing the libertarian movement in the United States. MacLean argues that these figures undertook "a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation."^[18] According to MacLean, Buchanan represents "the true origin story of today's well-heeled radical right".^[19] Some academic critics, many of them libertarians, have disputed the book's argument and called MacLean's thesis a conspiracy theory.^[20][21][22]