ABSTRACT
From the beginning American popular education reflected a bias towards practical, usable thought, embedded in living experience. When American institutions of higher learning moved towards maturity at the close of the nineteenth century, they came to incorporate a version of the philosophic style; and the new graduate schools reinforced it powerfully, notably in the study of human affairs. Americans were instinctively drawn to German university models, and strongly influenced by them. The Germans, too, when they came to generalize, were prone to broad concepts, only loosely linked to the bodies of fact they so painstakingly compiled. In both its dimensions—a devotion to the ordering of fact in terms of low-order abstraction and a certain vague disorder at high levels of abstraction—the American intellectual style has reflected the operator’s biases and fitted his needs. American policy-making consists in a series of reactions to major crises.
