Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
Most Americans don't know what "The Administrative State" is. Like goldfish don't know what water is.
Here is an introduction from my campaign website nearly 15 years ago:
"Administration" was Woodrow Wilson's middle name. That word carries a lot of baggage.
"Process Theology" = Process Predestination
R.J. Rushdoony writes:
Thus it is not predestination in itself which is an offense to man, but predestination by God. The culmination of [evolution] is control by scientific man of the various aspects and phases of [evolution], so that evolution is to be guided and controlled, life is to be created, minds invented as tools of the new gods, human minds shaped and directed by the gods of science through chemistry, and society itself made into a great machine in which man, economics, education, sexual reproduction and all else are made subservient to predestination by scientific controllers.
At this point, I offer again an essay by Gary North:
North would say we need to abolish "The Administrative State." James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said that the kind of government we now have -- where all three branches of government under the Constitution are administered by "experts" in a single government agency or bureaucracy -- is “the very essence of tyranny.” Never heard of "The Administrative State?" Check the legal scholars here. Note especially the article The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government.
People like President Woodrow Wilson argued that the U.S. has evolved past the Constitution. Wilson was an academic before he became a politician, teaching at many colleges and eventually becoming President of Princeton. "Administration" is Darwinian: in our newly-evolved state, we are more concerned with "efficiency" that will help us survive in the "struggle for life" (as Darwin put it). Instead of "We the People" governing the nation under the Constitution, we need more highly-evolved "experts" to govern us and administer the nation more efficiently than "the People" can do. We have evolved past the Constitution, and now need "Administration."
Wilson's closest advisor wrote a "fictional" book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator. Dru was a conscientious, benevolent, wise, public-spirited, highly-evolved, statesman.
"Philip Dru: Administrator" - was an anonymously published 1912 novel that was later revealed to be written by Colonel Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's closest advisor and confidant. The connection is striking and significant:
The novel's plot: Philip Dru is a West Point graduate who leads a revolution against a corrupt American government, becomes dictator ("Administrator"), and then systematically remakes American society according to progressive principles - establishing a graduated income tax, reforming banking and currency, creating labor protections, and centralizing administrative power. After accomplishing his reforms, Dru voluntarily relinquishes power and disappears.
The Wilson connection: House was Wilson's most influential advisor, particularly on foreign policy and progressive domestic reforms. Many of the policies Philip Dru implements in the novel mirror what Wilson actually pursued as president - the Federal Reserve Act, the income tax (16th Amendment), increased federal regulatory power, and expansion of the administrative state.
"Administrator" as ideal: The title itself is telling. Dru isn't called "President" or "Leader" but "Administrator" - reflecting the progressive faith in expert, scientific management of society above mere democratic politics. This echoes Wilson's vision of separating administration from politics and elevating trained administrators.
Critics have long pointed to this novel as evidence that Wilson's inner circle saw themselves as implementing a fundamental transformation of American governance, with the "administrator" as a enlightened technocrat who knows better than constitutional constraints or popular opinion what society needs.
The novel essentially provides a blueprint for the administrative state Wilson helped create.
When you suggest that fiction is real, you're accused of promoting "conspiracy theories."
- Woodrow Wilson and the Administrative State
- Woodrow Wilson is considered by historians to be the father of public administration.1 In 1886, Wilson was attending Johns Hopkins University for his PhD in political science when he wrote an essay that he finished November 4, 1886 titled The Study of Administration.2 Today, many view this moment, when Wilson published his paper, as the moment when public administration became a specific field of study in higher education. Wilson was the first and the last president to hold a PhD. In understanding history, it is important to know that Johns Hopkins University was known for its professors being educated in the tradition of German state theory and philosophy of history.3 A few years later, in 1889, Wilson published a book titled The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics where he performed an extensive study of historical governments and provided an outlook on what he believed was the proper function of government.
- 1. Ensure IAS, “Father of Public Administration,” ENSURE IAS, accessed Oct 3, 2023., https://ensureias.com/blog/public-administration/father-of-public-administration#.
- 2. Stillman, Richard J. “Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration: A New Look at an Old Essay.” The American Political Science Review 67, no. 2 (1973): 582-88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1958787.
- 3. Will, George F.. The Conservative Sensibility. United States: Hachette Books, 2019. 75.
Wilson helped make "Administration" a buzz-word in political science, and helped bring about The Birth of the Administrative State:
Administration and the "Living Constitution" With the threat of faction having receded as a result of historical progress, Wilson argued, a new understanding of the ends and scope of government was in order. This new understanding required an evolutionary understanding of the Constitution--one in which the ends and scope of government are determined by looking not to the pre-established law of the Constitution, but instead to the new demands placed upon government by contemporary historical circumstances.
In his New Freedom campaign for President in 1912, for instance, Wilson urged that the rigid, mechanical, "Newtonian" constitutionalism of the old liberalism be replaced by a "Darwinian" perspective, adjusting the Constitution as an organic entity to fit the ever-changing environment. Wilson also blamed separation-of-powers theory [in the Constitution] for what he believed to be the inflexibility of national government and its inability to handle the tasks required of it in the modern age:
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.[20]
Wilson saw the separation of powers as a hindrance because efficiency was to be valued over anything else. As he claimed in 1885, efficiency had become the pre-eminent principle in government because history had brought us to an age where the administrative functions of government were most important: "The period of constitution-making is passed now. We have reached a new territory in which we need new guides, the vast territory of administration."[21]
More Background. Madison and Jefferson would both agree that "Progressive" "Administration" is the opposite of "Constitutionalism," and is "the very essence of tyranny." Anyone committed to the Constitution would urge the repeal of "The Administrative State."
German Idealism is a late 18th–early 19th century movement (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) that treats mind or spirit as fundamentally constitutive of reality, and Wilson’s theory of administration draws on this tradition—especially Hegel—in conceiving a rational, expert bureaucracy as the organized “intelligence” of the modern state, distinct from day‑to‑day politics. In other words, German Idealism provides part of the philosophical background for Wilson’s idea that an expert administrative apparatus can embody the rational will of the community more systematically than electoral politics alone.
What German Idealism is
German Idealism is a philosophical movement in Germany roughly from the 1780s to the 1840s, originating in Immanuel Kant and developed by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Its core claims include the primacy of mind or spirit (Geist), the view that reality is fundamentally structured by consciousness or reason, and the ambition to systematize knowledge, nature, history, and society from a single rational principle (e.g., the “Absolute” or “Absolute Spirit”).
Kant’s “transcendental idealism” argues that we know objects only as they appear to us through our cognitive structures, not as things‑in‑themselves.
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel radicalize this into “absolute idealism,” holding that reality itself is an unfolding of mind or spirit, seeking to overcome subject–object dualism and treating history as a rational, developmental process.
Wilson’s theory of administration
In his 1887 essay “The Study of Administration,” Woodrow Wilson argues that modern government requires a distinct “science of administration” and that administration should be separated conceptually from partisan politics (the famous politics–administration dichotomy).
Wilson maintains that elected officials set broad goals, while trained administrators, organized in a professional bureaucracy, should have significant discretion to implement those goals efficiently and scientifically.
He holds that constitutional democracy must be supplemented and improved by administrative methods: expert civil servants selected by merit, comparative study of foreign (including Prussian) administrative systems, and a strong, competent bureaucracy capable of resisting or correcting short‑term popular impulses when necessary.
This vision treats administration as an “organized intelligence” of the state, relatively insulated from day‑to‑day political conflict, yet ultimately oriented to the public good defined at a higher, constitutional or legislative level.
How German Idealism shapes Wilson
Wilson was educated in an environment saturated with German thought and explicitly cites Hegel in “The Study of Administration,” quoting the line that “the philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought.’”
Scholars of Wilson’s political thought note that, although he also drew on British thinkers like Burke and Bagehot, his approach to administration is where the German, especially Hegelian, influence is strongest.
Hegel’s political philosophy understands the modern state (including its bureaucracy) as the embodiment of objective ethical life (Sittlichkeit), where a rational administrative apparatus articulates and realizes the universal interests of society.
Wilson’s depiction of administrators as a trained, quasi‑autonomous corps of experts—tasked with realizing general political purposes through specialized knowledge and method—mirrors this Hegelian picture of a rational, ethically charged state bureaucracy.
Conceptual links between them
Both German Idealism (especially Hegel) and Wilson treat history and social life as intelligible, developmental processes in which reason can be progressively realized through institutions.
Wilson’s theory translates the idealist idea of a rational, objective ethical order into concrete administrative terms: the bureaucracy becomes the locus where the rational “spirit of the age” is organized, studied, and applied through public administration.
The politics–administration distinction in Wilson can be read, in part, as echoing an idealist distinction between the immediate, conflictual realm of particular interests (politics) and a higher, more universal rational order (administration as organized intelligence).
Thus, German Idealism does not give Wilson a detailed administrative blueprint, but it provides the philosophical frame in which an expert, rational, relatively autonomous bureaucracy can be seen as the appropriate institutional embodiment of the community’s rational will.
- https://iep.utm.edu/germidea/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_idealism
- https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-german-stamp-on-wilsons-administrative-progressivism/
- https://static.heritage.org/CPP/FP_PS18.pdf
- https://www.albanygovernmentlawreview.org/api/v1/articles/32420-a-purple-garment-for-their-nakedness-wilson-hegel-and-the-non-delegation-doctrine.pdf
- https://fiveable.me/philosophical-texts/unit-6/german-idealism-fichte-schelling-hegel/study-guide/9GnmjlKH4LmkQ9ri
- https://ballotpedia.org/%22The_Study_of_Administration%22_by_Woodrow_Wilson_(1887)
- https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-administration-2/
- https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item:2937315/view
- https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/l2ggg6/explain_germ%C3%A1n_idealism_to_me_please/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE4zvHQd7kk
- https://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_german_idealism.html
- https://aksujacog.org.ng/articles/22/04/woodrow-wilsons-1887-essay-on-administration-and-the-challenges-before-21st-century-scholars/aksujacog_02_01_04.pdf
- https://estudosmarxistas.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/limnatis-german-idealism-and-the-problem-of-knowledge-kant-fichte-schelling-and-hegel-in-bb.pdf
- https://kids.kiddle.co/German_idealism
I would take this analysis further, beyond what Gary North would find acceptable:
- We must return to a purely Biblical society.
North has no objections to that phrase, but is not consistent, IMHO.
- Some call this "Theocracy." They think this would be a tyranny. "Handmaid's Tale." That's a myth. The word "Theocracy" comes from two Greek words meaning "God governs." Government by clergymen would be called an "ecclesiocracy."
- Some call this view "Patriarchy." I see the Biblical model as family-centered, and the Greek word for "family" is patria. It does not mean that men rule over women.
- Some call this view "Anarchy." Especially bureaucrats. They see where this is going. I call these people "archists," which is logically and etymologically correct, even if it's not a familiar or marketable term. A Biblical society is a 100% pure laissez-faire free market.
0% socialism
0% fascism
0% communism
0% "democratic socialism"
0% keynesianism
100% free market.
No "archists." The opposite of "free" is "coerced by aggression." Imposing your own will on others by force or threats of violence is sinful. The "archist" believes he has a right to do this. That "right" cannot be found in any verse in the Bible. Neither Trump nor Putin nor Xi Jinping can point to a verse in the Bible which gives them the right to impose their will on others by violence. A husband cannot impose his will on his wife (see "b" above). Nobody gets to be an archist except God. That's not to deny that God sometimes sends archists as a judgment against a sinful society. But then God punishes the archists for doing what He sent them to do. See Isaiah 10.
People have created all kinds of myths to justify archism, like "social contract." If I said I have drafted such a "social contract" that gives me rights over you, you (and your lawyer) would very properly object that there is no enforceable "contract" between us. My "social contract" is a myth. This kind of analysis is very ably set forth by Prof. Michael Huemer of the University of Colorado:
This is the product of progressivism. James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," said this was "the very essence of tyranny."