“The Gospel of Efficiency. Every era, as Carl Becker has reminded us in his Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, has a few words that epitomize its world-view and that are fixed points by which all else can be measured. In the Middle Ages they were such words as faith, grace, and God; in the eighteenth century they were such words as reason, nature, and rights; during the past fifty years in America they have been such words as cause, reaction, scientific, expert, progress and efficient. Efficiency is a natural ideal for a relatively immature and extrovert culture, but presumably its high development and wide acceptance are due to the fact that ours has been, par excellence, a machine civilization. At any event, efficiency grew to be a national catchword in the Progressive era as mechanization became the rule in American life, and it frequently appears in the literature of the period entangled in mechanical metaphor.”

—  Dwight Waldo

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 19

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Gospel of Efficiency. Every era, as Carl Becker has reminded us in his Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Phil…" by Dwight Waldo?
Dwight Waldo photo
Dwight Waldo 13
American political scientist 1913–2000

Related quotes

Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo

“Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 175 : Renoir's remarks to Vollard, referring to the delicate painting-style of Berthe Morisot's, the only French woman-artist of Paris Impressionism.

Nadine Gordimer photo

“In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)
Context: In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God's Word, the word that was Creation. But over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuation, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues. The word flies through space, it is bounced from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come.

Andrew Dickson White photo

“The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 167
Context: The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion, and Turgot could not but take account of his influence. Yet no one could apparently be more unlike those who were especially named as the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. He remained reverential; he was never blasphemous, never blatant; he was careful to avoid giving needless pain or arousing fruitless discussion; and, while the tendency of his whole thinking was evidently removing him from the orthodoxy of the Church, his was a broader and deeper philosophy than that which was then dominant.

W.B. Yeats photo
Michel Foucault photo

“Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Introduction : The Libertarian Tradition http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism1.htm
Communalism (1974)
Context: Prior to 1918 the word “communism” did not mean Left Social Democracy of the sort represented by the Russian Bolsheviks, a radical, revolutionary form of State socialism. Quite the contrary, it was used of those who wished in one way or another to abolish the State, who believed that socialism was not a matter of seizing power, but of doing away with power and returning society to an organic community of non-coercive human relations. They believed that this was what society was naturally, and that the State was only a morbid growth on the normal body of oeconomia, the housekeeping of the human family, grouped in voluntary association. Even the word “socialism” itself was originally applied to the free communist communities which were so common in America in the nineteenth century.

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“On this hallowed ground, heroic deeds were performed and eloquent words were spoken a century ago. We, the living, have not forgotten–and the world will never forget–the deeds or the words of Gettysburg. We honor them now”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)
Context: On this hallowed ground, heroic deeds were performed and eloquent words were spoken a century ago. We, the living, have not forgotten– and the world will never forget– the deeds or the words of Gettysburg. We honor them now as we join on this Memorial Day of 1963 in a prayer for permanent peace of the world and fulfillment of our hopes for universal freedom and justice.

George Holmes Howison photo

Related topics