Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
I doubt that most professors of political science could give an intelligent framing of the difference between Woodrow Wilson's concept of "Administration" and the Constitution of 1787.
German critical theory undermining the Bible and producing "liberalism" (which Machen fought against) emerged alongside "German Idealism," which led to the wholesale repudiation of the democratic republican theory of the Constitution of 1787. Most people have never heard of the repeal of the Constitution, and the connection with German Idealism. Some background might be helpful.
Immanuel Kant proposed a distinction between "noumena" and "phenomena." His followers drew some logical conclusions from Kant, and concluded that the only reality is in our mind. Rushdoony explained the thinking of Autonomous Man in his book The Word of Flux. If reality is only what autonomous human reason makes it out to be -- not what God created -- then the mind of the more-evolved among us should attempt to create a society in their own image. Here is where "philosophy" and "archism" begin to intersect. Woodrow Wilson is the only President who earned a Ph.D. He was President of Princeton before becoming President of the U.S.. His academic study was at Johns Hopkins, then a hot-bed of German philosophy.
Here is a summary of idealism. (Note that Osborn covers Shelling, and Frame covers Kant and Hegel). When you see the word "reason" think "autonomy." The mind of man as the new god. Literally, the creator of reality.
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.
"Philosophy" led to bad theology, bad evolutionary science, and bad "administrative" politics.
It is important to realize that "The Administrative State" (which we are now under) is a complete repudiation of the Constitution of 1787. We are no longer operating under that antiquated document. Yes, that's a crazy "conspiracy theory." Wilson said that "Administration" was "Darwinian" and Constitutional thinking was Newtonian (hence outdated).