Science. Experts.
Have you ever wondered how we got here?
I've spent many years focusing on the main progressives, in the political realm, and their ideas and bureaucracies and how that became pervasive throughout lawmaking in a way that so much of lawmaking really is not lawmaking any more in the sense of what it used to be. Modern laws are mainly permission slips for which the rest is handled by regulatory bodies, unelected reglatory bodies by the way, which can regulate and re-regulate and re-regulate behind our backs in the shadows and we have no idea what the rules actually are. Any announcements of regulatory change are tiny if at all, and virtually never covered in depth by journalistic outlets. We get regulatory changes done against us all the time.
But that is only half the story. How did industry also get infected by this idea? Well. That was Frederick Winslow Taylor. And make no mistake, Taylor's ideas for industry did have a "snap-back" sort of effect which only increased the cult of experts which was coming to dominate politics through Progressive leaders of that age of Progressivism such as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and many others.
Taylor's book, this is a very important starting point. This book launched international organizations which rallied around experts, and many of those organizations still exist up until this day under their original names or else, have been renamed and merged and many still exist under other new names.
https://librivox.org/the-principles-of-scientific-management-by-frederick-winslow-taylor/
For understanding the full sphere of how Taylorism and the cult of expertise infected everything, two cases stand out - one is a court case and the other is a case hearing. Muller v. Oregon, the court case which gave us the infamous "Brandeis Briefs" relied heavily upon the idea of rule by experts and "science". Now at this time Brandeis had not yet actually met with Taylor or his people but Brandeis was very much already deeply in that mindset by the time of this case. In 1910, Brandeis was involved in crucial dealings with the ICC for which, after meeting with Fred Taylor himself, Brandeis had his moment to fully deploy Taylorism on the national political stage.
Now, during this whole thing, nobody really asks "what is science?" For Taylor, it was science because Taylor said so. Boy that must be nice right? I'm the expert and listen to me because I'm the expert.
And so it is. The title of this book, "The Principles of Scientific Management" is partially not Taylor's choice. What is "Scientific Management?", that term? That term was coined by Louis Brandeis himself in 1910 in the hearings during the Eastern Rate Case. Brandeis shows what Scientific Management is, Taylor observes, then writes the book about those principles the following year. In Taylor's personal letters, he even credits Brandeis for the term. That's how the book came together.
That's how we got here. Of course progressive journalism had a strong role to play here as well, Brandeis's Eastern Rate Case findings caused a sensation at the time. Can't leave that out. Free press gushing is worth billions of dollars of advertising.
Make no mistake, Taylor was an elitist and a progressive himself. He just was not obsessed with the never ending increase in governmental power lording over us like most progressives are. That makes Taylor a bit of an oddity among most other progressives. For Taylor, the key word was always the word "efficiency." You know as well as I do, the word efficiency is constantly used by progressives in modern times and it has been that way for just about 100 years. That's all due to the assuming of Taylorist ideas through, among others, Louis Brandeis. Brandeis once exclaimed that "Efficiency is the hope of democracy."
That is how we got here. Woodrow Wilson wrote the birth certificate of the modern progressive administrative state in 1887, Theodore Roosevelt has the first real modern president to have started to build administrative state agencies employing experts,(Such as the 1903 Bureau of Corporations) and the combination of Taylor and Brandeis(and the media) mainstream it with cute colorful packaging in 1911. For those who want an excessively summarized timeline. That is not to say that there weren't others. Authors and advisors such as but not limited to Herbert Croly and Edward House played crucial roles by providing "intellectual firepower". But Mr. Scientific Management himself, Louis Brandeis, became a supreme court justice for 23 years and was nominated by Wilson himself.
Now, why didn't Wilson oppose the ideas of Scientific Management? You do not need me to explain that one.
You know why. Experts and science. It all comes full circle. That's how we got here.
