"The founding principles of the American Revolution-that all individuals have unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their labor, and that governments should exist only to protect these rights-were a singularity in human history. The nation's failure to secure the slaves' equal rights to self-ownership led to a civil war and the constitutional recognition of this vital principle. And yet, scarcely four decades later, social science faculties at the country's top colleges and universities repudiated the country's founding principles. The cause of this startling change was the education that hundreds of American college students and graduates received in German universities in the late 19th century. Germany's professoriate was dominated by state socialists who taught that individuals had no natural rights, only privileges granted to them by the government. American students absorbed these beliefs and after their return, established this country's first graduate-level programs, seeding the first generation of PhDs. Inventing the name "progressives" for themselves, their goal was to recast America's governmental and economic institutions in the image of Germany's authoritarian government and oligarchical society. Higher education was transformed with disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences. Generation after generation of students, including those who went on to teach, abandoned this country's traditional relationship of the individual to the state"--
"The founding principles of the American Revolution-that all individuals have unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their labor, and that governments should exist only to protect these rights-were a singularity in human history. The nation's failure to secure the slaves' equal rights to self-ownership led to a civil war and the constitutional recognition of this vital principle. And yet, scarcely four decades later, social science faculties at the country's top colleges and universities repudiated the country's founding principles. The cause of this startling change was the education that hundreds of American college students and graduates received in German universities in the late 19th century. Germany's professoriate was dominated by state socialists who taught that individuals had no natural rights, only privileges granted to them by the government. American students absorbed these beliefs and after their return, established this country's first graduate-level programs, seeding the first generation of PhDs. Inventing the name "progressives" for themselves, their goal was to recast America's governmental and economic institutions in the image of Germany's authoritarian government and oligarchical society. Higher education was transformed with disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences. Generation after generation of students, including those who went on to teach, abandoned this country's traditional relationship of the individual to the state"--
Über den Autor
JEFFREY E. PAUL is a research professor in the Social Philosophy and Policy Center of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. He was previously a research professor at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. Paul is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he played a pivotal role in the original founding of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center and was its Associate Director. He is also an executive editor of the journal Social Philosophy and Policy, published by Cambridge University Press, which has the largest circulation of any philosophy journal in the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. Paul has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has published many essays in major philosophy journals and edited many philosophical collections, including Reading Nozick and Labor Law and the Employment Market.
