Progressives, pluralists, and the problems of the state Book

"This New Era planning reflected both the antistatism of American political culture and the modern search for national managerial capabilities. Committed to voluntarism, it embraced the kind of 'individualism' that concentrated private power at the level of the business firm and refused to challenge managerial prerogatives. But it also fixed responsibility for the economy's overall performance at the level of the firm, and sought to educate individual businessmen to respond to the countercyclical prescriptions of social scientists. Such planning was, in effect, a microeconomic approach to macroeconomic coordination, one based on the assumption that if enough managers stabilized their operations along the lines recommended, then the sum of individual decisions, much like the invisible hand of the classical market, would add up to increased productivity, moderation of distributive conflict, and, thus, the collective good." (4)

"[T]he war had helped to blur the traditional distinction between advocacy and impartiality. It had enabled economists to demonstrate the utility of their techniques, to fuse science and services, and in the end to establish their professional identity along explicitly technocratic lines." (31-2)

"[F]undamental to those designs was a tendency to depoliticize authority, to remove political issues from political processes, and to encourage the determination of public policy within the administrative precincts of technocratic and managerial elites. This approach, be it in the New Era vision or its modern variants, appears capable of acquiring legitimacy in America only when linked to an economic expansion that can sustain the historic compromise between modern managerial impulses and the democratic ideals of mass opportunity and equity." (171)