1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Frank Johnson Goodnow

Frank Johnson Goodnow Quotes

Frank Johnson Goodnow was an American educator and legal scholar, born in Brooklyn, New York.

✵ 18. January 1859 – 15. November 1939
Frank Johnson Goodnow photo
Frank Johnson Goodnow: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Frank Johnson Goodnow Quotes

“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.
Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed.
Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow

Abstract, 2009 edition:
Politics and Administration (1900)

“What parts of this function of administration should be subjected to the control of the function of politics?”

Frank Johnson Goodnow

Source: Politics and Administration (1900), p. 22

“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.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow

Frank Johnson Goodnow, cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 44

“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.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow

Frank J. Goodnow: Municipal Home Rule. New York: Columbia University Press; 1906, p. 37

Similar authors

Reinhold Niebuhr photo
Reinhold Niebuhr 65
American protestant theologian
Hannah Arendt photo
Hannah Arendt 85
Jewish-American political theorist
Romain Rolland photo
Romain Rolland 43
French author
Svetlana Alexievich photo
Svetlana Alexievich 8
Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose w…
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Paul A. Samuelson 47
American economist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer
Noam Chomsky photo
Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist
Ludwig von Mises photo
Ludwig von Mises 62
austrian economist
Ilya Ehrenburg photo
Ilya Ehrenburg 1
Russian-Soviet writer and poet
Toni Morrison photo
Toni Morrison 184
American writer