Steven Alan Samson

Ph.D. in Political Science, researcher and publicist

Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber

It is remarkable how quickly America was transformed from an isolated agrarian republic in 1800 into a hegemonic industrial power by 1900. Intellectual and cultural changes that began taking root in the early half of the century yielded a cornucopia of new fruits in the latter half, including tax-supported public libraries, the rise of the scientific professions, and German-style graduate education. The impact of democracy, nationalism, industrialization, the reform crusades, sectionalism, urbanization, commerce, and immigration together gave new urgency to Crevecoeur’s old question: “What is this new man, the American?” More

Binding Leviathan: The Case for Institutional Liberty

Steven Alan Samson

In political theory, as in any inquiry, a question must begin with a perception or a premise. The question is this: How can the identity and integrity of a self-governing institution – whether a church, business, school, even a family – be maintained independently of the public agenda of a pervasively secular modern state? The perception that frames the question is that the American system of constitutional government, in particular, originated with specific reference to – and derived its essential character from – the covenant tradition of the Bible.[1] More

The Power of Vague Things: A Cautionary Tale

Steven Alan Samson

Paul Valery contends that power is founded on belief (a “vague thing”). Harold J. Berman believes the rule of law relies more on moral force than a police force. Yet the modern positivist worldview emphasizes the practical rather than the moral dimension of power. What are some consequences of this positivist belief? More

A Strategy of Subversion

Steven Alan Samson

Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of an ongoing strategy of cultural subversion.Directed towards the “conquest of the system,” the revolutionary strategy depicted by Schelsky, which was inspired by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and implemented by Rudi Dutschke, is premised on destroying the most significant features of political democracy. It bids to root out the fundamental political and social ideals and the corresponding patterns of life of the major groups within the system by discrediting the values, intellectual outlook, and institutional foundations of these groups, their ideals, and even the most ordinary interactions of their members. A useful comparison may be drawn with what Thomas Farr calls “China’s Second Cultural Revolution,” where Xi Jinping’s government controls the commanding heights and is endeavoring to introduce a utilitarian, soft-power “social credit” system to fine-tune its control. More

Engines of Liberty: American Experiment in Self-Government

Steven Alan Samson

Brague’s Challenge. In an American Spectator blog post, “Sin No More,” dated May 1, 2008, Rémi Brague stated a thesis worth exploring: “What cultures that were influenced by the Jewish and Christian religions made of the ideal of liberty that I have been finding in both Testaments is a task for historians. Impartial historians will observe how miserably the ideal and its realization often jarred with one another. On the other hand, they will have to acknowledge that free institutions hardly ever developed in places that were not influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been rare for thinkers to suppose that God endowed us with a nature of our own, that freedom is part of that nature, and that it is through the exercise of freedom, and the errors that inevitably stem from it, that we fulfill God’s plan… And when Lord Acton tells us that ‘liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is the highest political end’, he is echoing voices that can be heard in all the sacred books of our tradition, from the Torah to the epistles of St. Paul”. 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 illustrates the practical ways the ideal and its realization have been imaginatively developed even as they “jarred” with each other. More

The Crisis of Our Age: A Retrospective Glance

Steven Alan Samson

As a political philosophy and system of governance, liberalism is a product of Western Christian civilization. Yet some of its roots are decidedly illiberal. Thomas Hobbes offered an intellectual framework for our burgeoning Provider State, reducing people to hedonistic machines that accept the oversight of a Sovereign who serves as theologian-in-chief. Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited man’s natural compassion in support of rendering everyone collectively dependent on a sovereign General Will, which Jacques Maritain later called an “immanent social God”. Frederic Bastiat dismissed these pretensions by noting how self-serving lawmakers bend morality to justify—via greed and false philanthropy—the legal plunder that divisively empowers them. More

Breaking the Long Truce

Steven Alan Samson

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the ruling power of our country.[1] – Edward Bernays, 1928Ressentiment is directed at something which at the deepest level of his being the individual recognizes as good. Although there may be evil mixed with it (as in the sinful preacher), it is not the evil which is hated primarily but the good. Dwelling on the evil is ressentiment’s ploy for attacking the good.[2] – James Hitchcock, c. 1983 More

A Primer on Political Economy

Steven Alan Samson

Economist Walter E. Williams learned a principle of success by missing lunch. “At 13, I was a typical barbarian growing up in the slums of Philadelphia”, he recalls. “My mother supported us by working as a maid. Frivolous consumption often meant that I’d used up my school‑lunch funds by midweek, so I’d go to Mom to borrow money. Finally, one day Mom said ‘You knew you’d have to buy lunch when you spent the money’ and refused to fork over a dime. Saddled with what I was sure was the most callous mother on Earth, I went without lunch the rest of the week. I never frittered away my food money again – taking my first step toward civilization.” More

Revolt of the Disdained: Sovereignty or Submission

Steven Alan Samson

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. Donald Trump’s political fortunes rest to a considerable degree on his ability to secure broad public support while maintaining the loyalty of his original coalition of the disdained. More

Stealing into Power by Opposition to Power

Steven Alan Samson

Two acute observers of the American system and its decentralized character were Alexis de Tocqueville, who with his friend Gustave de Beaumont traveled through America for around nine months while studying America’s prisons, and Francis Lieber, a German émigré who met with them in Boston over the course of several days in September 1831.[1] The first published fruits of their budding relationship were Lieber’s translation and notes to Beaumont and Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1833) followed by Lieber’s Letters to a Gentleman in Germany (1834), which reproduced and embellished at least one of their conversations.[2] Lieber sent along with them several completed volumes of his Encyclopaedia Americana (13 vols., 1829-1833). Tocqueville likely drew on some of this material for his two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840).[3] More

The Restless Desire of Power for Power

Steven Alan Samson

Today, the regulatory operations of central governments impinge upon virtually all areas of life, leading to widespread efforts by interest groups to have their vision of the good life implemented through law and regulatory oversight. Much of the resulting fiscal, educational, and social intervention is largely invisible to the electorate. Nevertheless, what Thomas Hobbes called “the restless desire of power for power” has set into motion an insatiable empire of debt and dependency, redistribution and retribution, while it divides and rules. More

Protecting Fiscal and Constitutional Integrity

Steven Alan Samson

Liberty thrives under rule of law when it applies equally to all. What Francis Lieber called institutional liberty hinges on a willingness of the public and their leaders to recognize and uphold constitutional limitations on the state. Civil liberty and self-government suffer when the law is misused as an ideological instrument to remold society. Given the relative ease with which institutions are captured and diverted from their original purposes, political courage is required to resist, oppose, and reverse any acquired needs or rights which might result. Two 19C American exemplars of principled resistance to plunder are President Grover Cleveland and Justice Stephen Field. More