Steven Alan Samson

Ph.D. in Political Science, researcher and publicist

Reduction of Reality: From Positivism to Socialism

No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 The methodical conquest Paul Valéry had predicted in 1897 was realized in the total mobilization of all sides in the First World War. There followed a general political and cultural run on the bank in the 1920s that culminated in the Great Depression and almost universal peacetime experiments in economic and political regimentation. In “Politics of the Mind” (1932), he remarked: “we are blind and impotent, yet armed with knowledge and power, in a world we have organized and equipped, and whose inextricable complexity we now dread.” More

Liberty Without Asking for Permission

Steven Alan Samson

No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 My soon-to-be-published book, "Government by Permission", grew out of the research I began in graduate school in 1970 for a master’s thesis on the impact of modern science and technology on society. It subsequently developed into a long-term project which I have pursued in many directions and across multiple disciplines and which carried over – interchangeably – into a career of research, lecturing, and writing. To illustrate the continuity, this article is largely composed of passages drawn from my previous work. More

Regimes of Philosophic Doubt

Steven Alan Samson

No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 The Austrian-American emigré scholar Peter F. Drucker’s The End of Economic Man (1939) was an early study of the political causes of the rise of totalitarianism. The author began drafting it in 1933 when Hitler first came to power in Germany. Already holding a doctorate in international and public law, the 23-year-old Drucker had begun lecturing as a Dozent at Frankfurt University the previous year. He feared that Hitler would come to power and was prepared to leave Germany. So when, a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January, the new Nazi commissar harangued the faculty and forbade the presence of Jews on campus, Drucker abruptly resigned his position and returned to Vienna. He later left for the United States shortly before the Anschluss of 1938. Thus he became part of a large influx of scholars to America – the beginning of what later in the 1950s would be called the “brain drain” from Europe. Drucker eventually became the leading management consultant in the United States. More

Responses to Science and the Industrial Order, 1914-1950 [Part II]

Steven Alan Samson

No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 Modern technology invests political and other organizations with the means to increasingly organize all variables which impinge upon their operation. The need to economize an organization’s activities, due to a condition of insufficient means and material, motivates an effort to secure greater control over those variables on behalf of the organization’s presumed interests. This article – the second of two parts – is drawn from the second part of a paper written in 1971, which was used as the second chapter of my 1974 M.A. thesis, The Methodical Conquest: Perceptions of the Impact of Modern Technology on Society. It focuses on ideas put forward by writers from 1910-1950. More

Responses to Science and the Industrial Order, 1914-1950 [Part I]

Steven Alan Samson

No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Modern technology invests political and other organizations with the means to increasingly organize all variables which impinge upon their operation. The need to economize an organization’s activities, due to a condition of insufficient means and material, motivates an effort to secure greater control over those variables on behalf of the organization’s presumed interests. This article – the first of two parts – is drawn from the first part of a paper written in 1971, which was used as the second chapter of my 1974 M.A. thesis, The Methodical Conquest: Perceptions of the Impact of Modern Technology on Society. It focuses on ideas put forward by British and some continental writers from 1914-1950. More

Revolt of the Disdained: America’s 2016 Presidential Election

Steven Alan Samson

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 The 2016 presidential election hinged on the return of overlooked or marginalized middle-class and working-class Democrats and independents – many of whom had earlier supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – to reinvigorate traditional patriotism and help form a new “populist-conservative fusion in rural and industrial areas” within the Republican party. Eight years later, following his successful reelection, Donald Trump’s political fortunes still rest to a considerable degree on his ability to secure broad public support while maintaining the loyalty of his original coalition of the disdained.This article is drawn from “Revolt of the Disdained: America’s 2016 Presidential Election,” The Western Australian Jurist, 9 (2018). https://walta.net.au/wajurist/vol9/revolt-of-the-disdained-americas-2016-presidential-election/.An 2020 update of the original conclusion was published as “Revolt of the Disdained: Sovereignty or Submission,” The Market for Ideas, 23 (May-June 2020). https://www.themarketforideas.com/revolt-of-the-disdained-sovereignty-or-submission-a589/. More

Framing the American Commonwealth

Steven Alan Samson

No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 Historically, American political and religious liberty can neither be divorced from each other nor be understood apart from the struggle between church and state that wracked early modern Europe. The American constitutional tradition of liberty and self-government is rooted in the biblical concept of the covenant. Sixteenth century Reformers used biblical and historical models to carefully develop the idea of covenanted self-government into a pillar of the ecclesiastical and political order, thus giving rise to covenant (or federal) theology and the idea of political federalism. What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from this writer’s Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America (1984), chapter 5, “The American Commonwealth.” It is a sequel to “Engines of Liberty: American Experiments in Self-Government,” The Market for Ideas, 25 (Sept.-Oct. 2020). More

An Uneasy Partnership: Medieval Church and State

Steven Alan Samson

No. 48, Jul.-Aug. 2024 Western civilization, which emerged during the late Roman imperial period, is a mixture – perhaps even a synthesis – of Roman and Christian elements. Christianity rejuvenated the Roman world by introducing a dynamism and resilience lacking in earlier civilizations. The adoption and spread of the Christian faith inspired cultural, moral, and technological innovations within a Roman legal and administrative architecture which, through the generations, have transformed everyday life nearly everywhere. This article is drawn from the first part of chapter 3, “Early Christendom,” of Crossed Swords: Entanglements between Church and State in America (unpublished dissertation, University of Oregon, 1984), 101-19. It is a companion piece to “Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West” published in the Mar./Apr. 2023 issue. More

Models of Historical Interpretation

Steven Alan Samson

No. 46, Mar.-Apr. 2024 [Originally serving as two introductory lectures to my history courses, the following article was published at request of the editor in Contra Mundum 11 (Spring 1994): 12-20 under the same title. Long out of print, I hope these observations will prove to be of some value to another generation of readers.] More

Human Rights and America’s “Empire by Invitation”

Steven Alan Samson

No. 45, Jan.-Feb. 2024 The idea of universal human rights is part of the borrowed capital the West secularized from its Biblical origins as the eternal kingdom of Christ. Cut off from its source is becomes sentimental, utopian, ideological and sometimes apocalyptic. Most of the damage to the idea of universal human rights was done more than 75 years ago through the ideological twist which was added at the insistence of the Soviet Union after the Second World War.The first twenty-one points of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) are classified as civil and political rights: “freedoms from.” These are best regarded, first of all, as liberties which deserve protection rather than rights which have standing in courts of law. The next seven, which the Soviets insisted upon, are social and economic rights – “obligations to” – various social and economic categories. These might best be characterized as collective rather than individual rights, sometimes as claims upon the government treasury. They are rights other people – ultimately taxpayers – owe to a distinct class of people rather than liberties for all which governments are obliged to protect. More

Civilization Is Built on Borrowed Capital

Steven Alan Samson

The historical dynamism and resilience of Western civilization bespeaks both the Christian faith that laid its foundations and its ability to transform the families, institutions, and cultures of the world into which it grew. As faith wanes within its realm, cultural revolutionaries vie for control over the estate and the distribution of its assets. The prospect of recovery or renewal of the West depends on the character and courage of its heirs to restore a depleted heritage. The following article is drawn from the first two sections of “Cultural Vandalism: Lust to Rule, Road to Ruin,” Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left, ed. Augusto Zimmermann and Joshua Forrester (Connor Court, 2023) 221-37. Reprinted with permission. More

The Rich Dynamic of Faith in Action

Steven Alan Samson

One of the most incisive analyses of the secular transformation of America’s – indeed the West’s – ruling ideology was published a century ago in 1923 by a Presbyterian theologian, J. Gresham Machen. James Kurth would later describe its evolution as “the Protestant Deformation.”[2]During the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy which began before the First World War, Machen was the most articulate critic of a theological movement known as Modernism or Liberalism: a secular religion of sentiment poached from Christianity. His critique begins as follows: “The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meaning, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which we are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight. More