Dr. Jeffrey Paul is currently a professor of social philosophy at West Virginia University, the latest of the influential academic positions he has held. His book explains how the liberal madness in American universities came about, chiefly at the hands of German progressives in the 19th and early 20th centuries at the universities of Europe, where the philosophies of our nation’s early higher education leaders were formed.

The American nation that took shape at the end of the Revolutionary War was unique in the history of the world, based on the belief that human beings have “a right to self-ownership,” rather than ownership by other men or by government. But as the author makes clear, there were forces trying to undermine the true spirit of the founding almost from the start.

How this came about and what can be done to transcend its adverse consequences for American political culture and institutions is the essence of this informative treatise, which this reviewer found to be one of the most critical in recent years.

America’s Founders believed human beings have natural rights pertaining to “the relationship between man and society,” but that the “larger framework was the theistic worldview shared by most colonial Americans of the time...” In other words, the Founders believed in natural rights which come from God. As such, American citizens were entitled to the fruits of their labor, and the purpose of government was to protect their God-given rights.

This prevailing view lasted through the Civil War, when, at least theoretically, equal rights were secured for all citizens, but as Paul points out, it was then that the founding purpose of the nation began to be eroded and undermined. He shows that following the Civil War, “a counterrevolution began silently and out of public view that would, over time, set the stage for a second civil war.”

The counterrevolution began in higher education, which given the progressive ideology of colleges and universities over many decades, should come as no surprise to readers. After 1865, Paul writes, “the philosophy of natural rights — pioneered by John Locke, written into the Declaration of Independence, and reaffirmed by constitutional amendments following the Revolutionary and Civil Wars — would have seemed to be a settled statement about the fundamental relationship between the individual and the government.” But not so. “[A]cademics,” writes Paul, “became the growing enemy of this country’s founding principles, with deleterious consequences in primary and secondary education, law, the judiciary, journalism, and politics.”

Early in our nation’s history, American universities and colleges were teaching institutions rather than research institutions that awarded doctoral degrees. University and college presidents felt this situation needed to be remedied and looked to Europe, specifically Germany, where doctoral programs and degrees had been awarded for generations. Their remedy was to import into their institutions Americans who had received German doctorates to start doctoral programs, which effectively gave these Americans trained in Germany a monopoly over American higher education.

According to the author, this “monopoly” was fine for the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine (the empirical sciences), but in the humanities it proved disastrous, with the German professoriate “profoundly at odds with those [values] that animated the American Founding....”

Trained at the hands of these German professors at German universities or by Americans awarded doctorates by those institutions, the American theory of property resting on labor, “and therefore on what is conceived to be the ‘natural’ right of each man to that which he has produced” fell out of fashion and gradually became lost.

Writes Paul: “Treating academic disciplines such as political science, history, political philosophy, and sociology as if they were sciences was the equivalent of founding a department of religious studies and staffing it with theologians of one religion.” And by filling these departments with only the opponents of natural rights and simultaneously portraying their disciplines as purely empirical sciences, this is exactly what they did.

When academic leaders rejected the concept of natural rights and replaced it with the belief that there should be “no fixed moral boundaries to government powers,” it included the acquired outlook that “the highly educated were a new class entitled to formulate the rules by which the rest of society should live.”

The author contends that rights as viewed by the Founders are irreconcilable with the progressives that believe there are no individual rights but only a duty to obey [the authoritative state]. “The history of Germany in the 1930s is an indication of what can happen when the view that there are no individual rights becomes the dominant view in a society.”

The progressive (socialist) movement infected both American political parties initially, but gained complete control over the Democrat party in the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, and spread from the presidency on down to ultimately dominate the party.

Paul believes that as this irreconcilable contradiction in philosophy has played out in the 20th and 21st centuries, “we are in a very perilous position, far more than at any time in American history.” He writes that, for the most part, Americans did not see this coming, with the exception of Cornell University Professor Herbert Tuttle, an eminent German historian, who warned in 1883 that “American higher education is rapidly becoming Germanized.”

In the author’s view, the immediate peril America now faces could be addressed by the Republican party, which despite its many flaws, essentially remains the non-autocratic party. But Republicans need a key issue with which to attract a majority of voters.

Paul proposes that this overarching issue is an overhaul of America’s system of taxation, the history of which he describes in detail early in the book. In his view, and the views of expert economists with whom he has consulted, the entire system should be overturned and replaced with a universal one percent “personal sales tax” on all expenditures; not just retail sales but including those of financial markets — stocks, bonds — and encompassing virtually every purchase.

More revenue would be raised by this means, he asserts, than by the current system, and at the same time, would be very attractive to the middle class. If taken up by Republicans in a serious and focused way, he believes, it would give them a solid majority.

Winning America’s Second Civil War explains how progressive economists and academicians forced the current tax system that penalizes the middle and lower-income classes, thus encouraging dependence on government. The author warns that if the U.S. “succumbs to a one-party autocracy, it will not be by state expropriation of capital or the abolition of private enterprise. Instead, it would be the result of extracting so much income from people’s earnings that they become utterly dependent upon government provision, as well as by controlling businesses so strictly that their freedom to act depends on rules made up by federal agencies.”

While reforming the tax system is at the top of the author’s list, he also recommends in the short term, “political reforms that can impede the damage done over the past century and a half.” As an example, he recommends that “the government monopoly on public education forcibly funded by the parents should be replaced.... There are already laws now in some states that allow parents to withdraw the percentage of a public schools’ per-child tax revenue and use it to pay for their children’s education at a school of their choice. Those laws should be adopted everywhere.”

As for the universities, Paul doesn’t hold out much hope. “Change, if any,” he writes, “will have to come from the outside, beginning with the elimination of federal subsidies and grants to all universities. The taxpayers who dissent from the ideology that dominates those institutions are having their First Amendment rights traduced.”

Winning America’s Second Civil War is an absorbing study in how America arrived at its current precarious position in history, and provides a perspective that, to this reviewer, has been largely overlooked—that of the influence of the accidental monopoly of German socialist influence over higher education early on. As Paul writes: One can only hope that by recounting what happened since the first civil war, we can begin to recover universal human rights and the institutions founded to protect them.”

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com OR ThriftBooks.com to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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