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The Science of 'Muddling Through' (1959)
Charles Lindblom's 1959 article in Public Administration Review — the twenty-page essay that demolished the intellectual foundations of comprehensive rational planning and established the incrementalist alternative that has shaped policy analysis for six decades.
The most cited article in the history of public administration, Lindblom's 'The Science of Muddling Through' was published in Public Administration Review in the spring of 1959. The article did not attack any particular policy. It attacked the assumption underneath all policies: that complex problems can be solved through comprehensive rational analysis. Lindblom argued that what policy analysts actually do — compare a limited number of alternatives that differ incrementally from the status quo — is not a lamentable deviation from the rational ideal but a different, defensible, and superior method adapted to the cognitive, evaluative, and informational constraints that real institutions operate under.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The article appeared at a moment when postwar optimism about rational planning was at its peak. Operations research had delivered remarkable victories during World War II. Herbert Simon's work on organizational decision-making was establishing the behavioral foundations of administrative