Frank Johnson Goodnow
Frank Johnson Goodnow
Frank Johnson Goodnow was an American educator and legal scholar. He was the first president of the American Political Science Association. He was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
"The state attains its ends as well through liberty as through government, as well through entrusting the care of matters of public interest to individuals as through the maintenance of public governmental services for their management."
"The use of the word "administration," is unfortunately somewhat misleading, for the word when accompanied by the definite article is also used to indicate... popularly the most important executive or administrative authorities."
"What parts of this function of administration should be subjected to the control of the function of politics?"
"The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators."
"When Woodrow Wilson wrote his essay "The Study of Administration" in 1887, he attempted to square the needs of a complex industrial nation with the demands of a democratic political culture (Felker 1993). With a vision of administration untouched by politics, he prescribed their separation. Frank Goodnow’s book Politics and Administration (1900) elaborated on this dichotomy, and Leonard White’s (1926) work made the separation of politics and administration an article of faith in the first textbook on the subject. This is emblematic of a turn public administration made at its inception, a decision paralleled by political science as it embraced the “god” of science and ignored the truth of context, history, values, and, messiest of all, unforeseen, unpredictable exigencies."
"Another of Wilsons contemporaries who was greatly concerned about the mixing or "meddling" of politics with administration was Professor Frank J. Goodnow, who Inter became President of The Johns Hopkins University. Goodnow formalized his conception of administration in 1900 in his aptly entitled book, Politics and Administration. Goodnows definition was similar to Wilsons, although he made the technical distinction, which Wilson had rejected, between politics as "the expression of the will of the state" and administration as "the execution of that will;" • but what was more important in Goodnows concept of administration was the fact that he saw its wider implications in the long sweep of American history."
"American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science."
