Although the founder of the Catholic church said that “My Kingdom is not of this world,” one commentator correctly has observed of the church that “few contemporary institutions have been more intimately — and none more continuously — involved in the political order.” Never was the church's temporal dimension more graphically illustrated than in the June 1979 visit to his homeland of Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, Poland. Millions of people, many of them from other Communist countries, heard the first pontiff ever elected from a Soviet bloc nation repeatedly call for respect for human rights, for provision of religious liberties, and for the primacy of the individual over the state — demands that many regimes, including Communist ones, have been notably reluctant to grant. The pontiff also publicly raised the delicate issue of Polish-Soviet relations, asserting that alliances must be based on mutual respect and equality and that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.”

Even a cursory review of contemporary scholarship on the presidency and the federal administration reveals a resurgence of interest in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson. Developments in the last decade involving the apparent enlargement of the authority and prerogatives of the national executive together with the popularization of the idea of an emerging American bureaucratic state have contributed to this renewal of interest in the work of both theorists. What is especially striking is that to a considerable extent the contemporary interest in the thought of Hamilton, and to a lesser but still significant degree in the political teaching of Woodrow Wilson, is rooted in the crystallization of opinion that is critical of the alleged predominance of the executive establishment and the appearance of an “imperial” presidency on the one hand, and the systematic interference of federal administration in the affairs of the people on the other. Thus, for example, a major theme in both the popular and academic press during the period of American history bracketed by the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis centered on the illiberalism of a powerful executive. More recently, proponents of participationist democracy, particularly the devotees of the public interest advocacy movement and the self-styled Tocquevillians of the public choice school, have urged reforms to check the concentration of power in the central government in general, and the national executive in particular. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, alongside this indictment of the national government has emerged an increasing tendency to cast Hamilton, witness the work of James McGregor Burns, and Wilson, a frequent target of criticism in the writings of that wing of the public choice school which includes Vincent Ostrom, as the theoreticians of a centralized executive-administrative order.

A half century ago Herbert Hoover entered the presidency and the “Great Engineer” of the 1920's became, after 1930, the butt of Depression era jokes. The economic collapse which began in 1929 not only broke Hoover's presidency, it obscured his accomplishments as a key public figure in American life during this century.

Technology does not, at first glance, appear to have been a subject of importance in American political thought. One can peruse the writings of American political thinkers — from lofty philosophers to campaign agitators — and find few references to technology as such, even in the contemporary period. Political writings concentrate on other, apparently more “political” topics — liberty, equality, and justice, states' rights, civil liberties, and the distribution of powers. To argue that technology constitutes a hidden but centrally important variable in American political thought might seem to many to be elevating an esoteric personal interest into a central concern, to be rewriting the history of ideas in order to provide a track on which one's own personal hobbyhorse can be ridden.

An effective political ideology is invariably the result of the intersection of a number of discrete influences. In the first instance, a political leader is almost always possessed of some set of philosophic and political convictions that he has, for one reason or another, made his own. The ideas of the Epicureans and of John Locke regularly surface in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson, and elements of the thought of Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel and N. G. Chernyshevski are mixed inextricably in the political ideology of V. I. Lenin. As much might be said of almost every political leader who makes any pretense at ideological sophistication.