The Key To Understanding The State

As an instructor on government to today’s high school youth, I am always on the lookout for insightful explorations of this important topic. It was to my delight that I came upon the thoughts of a learned professor of jurisprudence and politics of Princeton University in his treatise, The State:  Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. In this densely packed 656 page analysis he begins by noting:

For purposes of widest comparison in tracing the development of government it would of course be desirable to include in a study of early society not only those Aryan and Semitic races which have played the chief parts in the history of the European world, but also every primitive tribe, whether Hottentot or Iroquois, Finn or Turk, of whose institutions and development we know anything at all.  Such a world-wide survey would be necessary to any induction which should claim to trace government in all its forms to a common archetype.  But, practically, no such sweeping together of incongruous savage usage and tradition is needed to construct a safe text from which to study the governments that have grown and come to full flower in the political world to which we belong .  .  . The main stocks of modern European forms of government are Aryan.  The institutional history of Semitic or Turanian peoples is hardly part of the history of European governments:  it is only analogous to it in many of the earlier stages of development.

Ah ha!  So there is the essential key to unlocking the essence and nature of government — the fundamental positive contributions of the Aryan race to European civilization, in contract to the marginalized or spurious Semitic notions. And who is the distinguished author of this decorous academic study — Woodrow Wilson —  the same Woodrow Wilson who later as president, presided over the exhibition to his cabinet and their families of the notorious pro-Ku Klux Klan filmThe Birth of a Nation, in the White House.

Based on the novel, The Clansman, by his Johns Hopkins classmate Thomas Dixon, the movie included a slide quoting Wilson’s History of the American People in defense of the Klan, and another citing how “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.” It leads one to ponder the impact Woodrow Wilson’s scholastic works had on Adolf Hitler in the drafting of his own Mein Kampf.

Share

7:36 pm on September 15, 2019