Introduction 169
Th e boldness of Simon’s assertions prompted one of the sharpest exchanges in
the history of academic public administration, one that defi ned the two dominant
scholarly perspectives in the fi eld for the next fi ft y years. In 1952, Dwight Waldo
published a long essay that reviewed much of the public administration literature
of the time, including Simon’s Administrative Behavior. Waldo wrote this (pre-
sented here in condensed form):
One major obstacle in the way of further development of democratic theory
is the idea that effi ciency is a value-neutral concept or, still worse, that it is
antithetical to democracy. To hold that we should take effi ciency as the cen-
tral concept of our “science” but that we nevertheless must tolerate a certain
amount of democracy because we “believe” in it, is to poison the taproot of
American society. To maintain that effi ciency is value-neutral and to propose
at the same time that it be used as the central concept in a “science” of admin-
istration is to commit oneself to nihilism, so long as the prescription is actually
followed.
Effi ciency is, however, a tenet of orthodoxy that has refused to decline. No
one now believes in a strict separation of politics and administration; but in the
proposition that there are “value decisions” and “factual decisions” and that the
latter can be made in terms of effi ciency.
In this contention, the present “weight of authority” is against me. But I be-
lieve that there is no realm of “factual decisions” from which values are excluded.
To decide is to choose between alternatives; to choose between alternatives is to
introduce values. Herbert Simon has patently made outstanding contributions
to administrative study. Th ese contributions have been made, however, when he
has worked free of the methodology he has asserted. (1952)Simon’s reply (again presented in condensed form):Study of logic and empirical science has impressed on me the extreme care that
must be exercised, in the search for truth, to avoid logical booby traps. For this
reason the kind of prose I encounter in writings on political theory, decorated
with assertion, invective, and metaphor, sometimes strikes me as esthetically
pleasing, but seldom as convincing.
No one who has studied seriously the writings of logical positivists, or my
own discussion of fact and value in Administrative Behavior, could attribute to
us the “proposition that there are ‘value decisions’ and ‘factual decisions.’”
Quite apart from whether Mr. Waldo’s premises are right or wrong, I do not
see how we can progress in political philosophy if we continue to think and write
in the loose, literary, metaphorical style that he and most other political theorists
adopt. Th e standard of unrigor that is tolerated in political theory would not re-
ceive a passing grade in the elementary course in logic, Aristotelian or symbolic.
(1952b)