Taylor’s bargain: The Rise of the Megacorporation
And I say that Taylor’s bargain was to present the Americans with a choice, as it were. A choice over which they could, in fact, exercise their will if they could figure out what it was to be decided and how they wanted to decide it. They were faced with a choice of accepting the new industrialization and the material wealth that it produced. And thereby sacrificing the elements of autonomy, which many of them had cherished and which many of them believed was the animating value of the American experiment in responsible self government.
… Brandeis was, in the words of one of his biographers, a Jeffersonian for the 20th century. And I think that sort of thing captures it. And I believe, in large measure, that these guys were right. That is, I think that America is now a much, much more materialistic country than it was even 120 years ago.