"I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough"
About this Quote
Efficiency is the god-word of modern life, and Felix Frankfurter is calmly sticking a pin in it. Coming from a Supreme Court justice, the line lands with extra bite: this isn’t a bohemian lament about hustle culture, it’s a warning from someone who watched institutions turn people into instruments.
Frankfurter’s “too efficient” isn’t praise with a small caveat. It’s an indictment of a personality type and, more pointedly, a governing style. Efficiency can mean speed without reflection, procedure without conscience, victory without restraint. In a courtroom - and in the administrative state Frankfurter both revered and feared - the most “efficient” operator is often the one most willing to compress messy human realities into tidy categories. That compression is useful for bureaucracies; it’s dangerous for justice.
The subtext is that humanity is inefficient by design. It hesitates. It second-guesses. It listens to irrelevant-seeming details that later turn out to be the whole moral point. Frankfurter, a champion of judicial restraint, spent his career arguing that law isn’t just a machine for producing outcomes; it’s a discipline that should respect limits, history, and the fallibility of judges. “Not human enough” hints at a kind of moral anemia: the efficient man may be brilliant, tireless, even “effective,” but effectiveness detached from empathy becomes a sterile competence.
The line also reads like a coded critique of technocratic confidence: the idea that society’s problems are engineering puzzles. Frankfurter is reminding us that when a person runs too smoothly, something vital - doubt, mercy, humility - may have been engineered out.
Frankfurter’s “too efficient” isn’t praise with a small caveat. It’s an indictment of a personality type and, more pointedly, a governing style. Efficiency can mean speed without reflection, procedure without conscience, victory without restraint. In a courtroom - and in the administrative state Frankfurter both revered and feared - the most “efficient” operator is often the one most willing to compress messy human realities into tidy categories. That compression is useful for bureaucracies; it’s dangerous for justice.
The subtext is that humanity is inefficient by design. It hesitates. It second-guesses. It listens to irrelevant-seeming details that later turn out to be the whole moral point. Frankfurter, a champion of judicial restraint, spent his career arguing that law isn’t just a machine for producing outcomes; it’s a discipline that should respect limits, history, and the fallibility of judges. “Not human enough” hints at a kind of moral anemia: the efficient man may be brilliant, tireless, even “effective,” but effectiveness detached from empathy becomes a sterile competence.
The line also reads like a coded critique of technocratic confidence: the idea that society’s problems are engineering puzzles. Frankfurter is reminding us that when a person runs too smoothly, something vital - doubt, mercy, humility - may have been engineered out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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