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This paper aims to review the life and work of one of America’s earliest social researchers, Robert Staughton Lynd (1892-1970). In doing so, it also re-introduces Lynd’s seminal Middletown studies to a wider audience within academic consumer research.

Using the historical-biographical method, light is shed on the developments that led to the publication of the Middletown studies and on the way these studies were received by various audiences.

The critical impetus of interwar social researcher Lynd was to some extent an outcome of his own entanglement with professional marketing and advertising, and of his Protestant religiosity. This insight has important bearings for critical consumer research as well as consumer culture theory today.

Market and consumer research comes in many forms. Throughout its history, market and consumer research benefitted from and overlapped with the rise of social research. To fully understand the social and political implications of their work, market and consumer researchers need to have firm knowledge of this interaction with the social sciences and with religious movements in a secular society.

Very little is known about the interaction between Robert Lynd’s social research and the sphere of market and consumer research. This interaction is studied by drawing on the secondary literature and on archival sources.

This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.

Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains, raised questions about James M. Buchanan’s commitment to democracy. This chapter investigates the relationship of classical liberalism in general and of Buchanan in particular to democratic theory. Contrary to the simplistic classical liberal juxtaposition of “coercion vs. consent,” there have been from Antiquity onward voluntary contractarian defenses of non-democratic government and even slavery – all little noticed by classical liberal scholars who prefer to think of democracy as just “government by the consent of the governed” and slavery as being inherently coercive. Historically, democratic theory had to go beyond that simplistic notion of democracy to develop a critique of consent-based non-democratic government, for example, the Hobbesian pactum subjectionis. That critique was based firstly on the distinction between contracts or constitutions of alienation (translatio) versus delegation (concessio). Then, the contracts of alienation were ruled out based on the theory of inalienable rights that descends from the reformation doctrine of inalienability of conscience down through the Enlightenment to modern times in the abolitionist and democratic movements. While he developed no theory of inalienability, the mature Buchanan explicitly allowed only a constitution of delegation, contrary to many modern classical liberals or libertarians who consider the choice between consent-based democratic or non-democratic governments (e.g., private cities or shareholder states) to be a pragmatic one. But Buchanan seems to not even realize that his at-most delegation dictum would also rule out the employer–employee or human rental contract which is a contract of alienation “within the scope of the employment.”