In any event, Paul provides an indispensable genealogy of America’s progressive intellectual establishment, which gave us the progressive income tax and the administrative state. Both together, as he says, allowed a new oligarchy to emerge through collective ownership of the means of production and consumption.

Scott Yenor

A pernicious ideology has captured America’s institutions of higher learning, especially its most prestigious universities. The ideas born in those universities percolated into politics. They captured media, the unofficial mouthpiece of our university-educated governing classes. The ideology upended what appeared to be otherwise good-enough institutions that shepherded the country through a bloody war. Now these hostile, foreign ideas seem regnant though the familiar institutions look the same. 

While Jeffrey E. Paul’s Winning America’s Second Civil War seems ripped from today’s headlines, it concerns how the spirit of German philosophy conquered America’s universities at the end of the 1800s. Progressive philosophy did not emerge full-grown from the head of Woodrow Wilson. It was imported as American social scientists and educational reformers went to Prussia and Germany and institutionalized its ways in America.

Paul, a research professor at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at West Virginia University, delivers the receipts about the German influence on American universities, especially in areas of government and economics. And then he traces the specific elements of that influence to pathologies of American government today. Paul’s is a modified German invasion thesis, where foreign—specifically German—ideas have corrupted American culture. It’s just that the invasion happened nearly a century earlier than when the Frankfurt school rose to prominence in America.

The University of Berlin—the German flagship, but not the oldest university—was founded in 1807. Wilhelm von Humboldt was the civil servant most directly responsible for its creation. His public memo “On Germany’s Educational System” envisioned a university based on the centrality of research to teaching and academic freedom so as to achieve Wissenschaft (scientific knowledge). “Higher academic institutions are the pinnacle of a nation’s moral culture,” von Humboldt began his memo, and their calling was “to pursue knowledge in the broadest and deepest sense of the word … as the autonomous, self-arranging material of intellectual and ethical formation.” Bold words. In practice, this meant that Berlin was devoted to research infused teaching mostly on the state’s dime. Talent flooded in chemistry, biology, history, philosophy, and theology.

Americans and others were intrigued. American enthusiasts like George Ticknor visited German universities and reported on their glories to Thomas Jefferson as the former president was writing his proposal for the University of Virginia. Yet if some Americans were bewitched by the German universities’ promise to conquer nature, American schools were generally happy with their classical collegiate model, requiring Latin and Greek for admission and having a mostly prescribed curriculum. Technological advancements could happen outside the academy. As the famous Yale Report (1828), defending the old collegiate model, held, “We hope at least, that this college may be spared the mortification of a ludicrous attempt to imitate them [i.e., German universities].” Only 25 colleges were charted in America between 1630 and 1800, and another 44 were charted before 1830. And the vast majority of American college presidents before were graduates of either Yale or the College of New Jersey (i.e., Princeton), its imitator.

Yet 175 colleges and universities were chartered between 1860 and 1870, and, as Paul shows, the general attitude toward the German university at that time reflected none of the do-it-our-way cussedness found in the Yale Report. The astounding expansion in higher education (abetted by the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862) created a market for the importing the German research university.

Paul does not object in principle to this German import, which allowed for New Thinking and greater natural science research. “The transformation of American higher education in the last quarter of the 19th century,” Paul writes, “provided a foundation for remarkable achievements in the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine in the next century.” The German invasion in social sciences was not so happy. “In what were called the social sciences and some of the humanities, the record was, at best, ambiguous.” The burden of Paul’s book is to show (1) that there was a straight line from German social science to progressive political philosophy and then progressive political practice and (2) that the effects were not just “ambiguous” but lent themselves to the emergence of an oligarchic, and perhaps a tyrannical, form of government.

What did this German-informed university look like?

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