The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government

Argues that engineers influenced by French Enlightenment science built much of the machinery of America’s military state while redrawing the line between the federal government and society.

In The Scientific-Military State, Sveinn M. Jóhannesson charts the emergence of a new kind of governance in early-nineteenth-century America: the scientific-military state. Federal officials used mathematics, science, and other forms of enlightened knowledge to launch the nation’s very first experiments...