progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
writing on his dissent is quite telling and it should have gotten a bit more coverage by the
author. Brandeis states in his dissent:
"Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his
peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely
protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and
papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all
others would lose half their value."
To me this needs a substantially longer discussion but the author does do it some credit.
4.6.2 Style
The second issue is the relationship between Brandeis and Taylor and Galbreth, both
early 20th century management consultants. There is a recent article in The New Yorker
by Jill Lepore, a superb piece of critical and historical analysis of Brandeis, which
discusses this relationship in detail and presents many of the weaknesses in Brandeis.
Lepore looks at Brandeis through the lens of the management and efficiency consultants,
in many ways the hucksters who predated the current Business Schools. She starts her
article by stating:
"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to
a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from
Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at
Brandeis's urging, decided to call what they were experts at "scientific management."
Everyone there--including Frank and Lillian Galbreth, best known today as the parents
in "Cheaper by the Dozen"--had contracted "Tayloritis": they were enthralled by an
industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been
ordering people around, scientifically, for years."
The essence of the tale is that Brandeis, who at the time was sitting on a regulatory body
which controlled the monopoly like rates of railroads had gotten enthralled with the less
than scientific work of Taylor and the Galbreth. He then saw that railroads should employ
these new management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore
states, the Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for many other
"scientifically" based causes seeking legal justification. Brandeis was a brilliant legal
scholar, however he had no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did
however understand the "books" and "records" of a company and as such he had used this
profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach assumed you looked forward and
not backward, that you understood the business as a living entity and not just the records
of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked backwards
for precedent.
The author of the present biography gives, in my opinion, short shrift to this issue
discussed by Lepore. He covers it on pp 240-243 but his discussion misses the key point
presented by Lepore. Namely that Brandies became enamored with Taylor and Galbreth
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