Ideas do not exist in a sterile vacuum but are often intertwined and serendipitously related to each other. Such is the case of various statist doctrines that came to fruition in the 19^th century, and which still dramatically affect our world today. “Scientific racism,” “social Darwinism,” eugenics, Comtean positivism, imperialism, and “social imperialism,” were pseudoscientific rationales for the expansionary and invasive welfare-warfare state at home and abroad. Intellectuals and politicians in the United States were drawn to Progressivism by the same elitist positivism that drew them to other “social control” rationalizations; commitment to the explanatory power of scientific social inquiry to get at the root causes of social and economic problems; the legitimacy of coercive social control, deriving from a holist conception of society as prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals; and the efficacy of elitist social control via expert management of the state apparatus.

The Best of Charles Burris