GOOGLE SEARCH: "GERMAN POLITICAL THEORY"

The American students [of the late 19th and early 20th century] absorbed from Germany not only professional methods of academic research, but the authoritarian ideas within which these had been posed. German thought had long been dominated by a preoccupation with "the State," and that concept soon would become the primary organizing category of American political science. Most of the initial writings by American political scientists would be framed as inquiries into "the nature of the State"...

Men did not lose anything upon entering "the State," since there had been no natural freedom to give up. In Woolsey's terms, "the right of the state to be comes not from renounced power, but from the state's being, in the natural order of things, God's method of helping men towards a perfect life." Lieber and Woolsey labeled social contract theory "atomistic," "unhistorical," and "dangerous," favoring "tyranny and licentiousness" and "utterly destructive of political authority."