Remembering Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001)

• Published date: 01 July 2001
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00043
• Author: Mie Augier,James G. March
• Date: 01 July 2001

396 Public Administration Review •July/August 2001, Vol. 61, No. 4

Mie Augier

Stanford University

James G. March

Stanford University

Remembering Herbert A. Simon

(1916–2001)

Mie Augier is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her research

interests include behavioral economics, organization theory and organiza-

tional economics, and the history of economic thought. Email: augier@

stanford.edu.

James G. March is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He has four

children, six grandchildren, and three step-grandchildren. He also does re-

search and writing on decision making, learning, risk taking, and the pursuit

of intelligence in organizations. Email: march@leland.stanford.edu.

Herbert A. Simon died on February 9, 2001, at the age

of 84. At the time of his death, he was the Richard King

Mellon University Professor at Carnegie-Mellon Univer-

sity, an institution that he had graced for 52 years. During

his long career, he produced scholarly publications at an

annual rate that was substantially greater than the lifetime

rate of the vast majority of his colleagues. Simon’s first

published article appeared in 1937. His official vita lists

more than 900 publications in the ensuing 64 years, ex-

cluding many reprintings and translations. It is an extraor-

dinary record, and simply recounting the numbers signifi-

cantly underestimates Simon’s influence.

In a narrow sense, only a very small fraction of Simon’s

productivity could be described as stemming from research

in public administration. But in a broader sense, many of

the ideas and visions that stayed with him throughout his

career were first formulated within the framework of pub-

lic administration. Simon’s link to public administration is

threefold: First, he started there. His early academic ap-

pointments and most of his early research were in public

administration. He coauthored a textbook in public admin-

istration. Second, his impact on the field was exceptional.

Almost from the beginning, he was an intellectual force.

Third, he never left the field conceptually. Throughout his

career, he maintained a focus on a central concern of pub-

lic administration—how do limited (but reasoned) human

beings, individually and in social organizations, solve prob-

lems, and how might they do so more effectively?

Simon influenced many disciplines, but he was, first

of all, a political scientist and a student of public admin-

istration. His writings persistently reflect a perspective

drawn from his early interest in administrative decision

making and public administration. This history is often

overlooked, but it is obvious to anyone who reviews the

entire Simon œuvre. For example, the concept of bounded

rationality, which became a vital platform for much of

his subsequent work in artificial intelligence (Newell

1989), emerged within the context of early work in pub-

lic administration, organization theory, and economics

(Simon 1989). More generally, though Simon’s interest

in human problem solving led to pioneering work in dis-

ciplines that are seemingly far removed from public ad-

ministration, he retained a perspective familiar to that

field—a commitment not only to understanding human

behavior, but also to reforming human practices and in-

stitutions. He was a proper missionary.

The Beginning: Young Jesus in

the Temple

Herbert Simon was born in 1916 in Milwaukee, Wis-

consin, and educated in political science at the University

of Chicago. According to his autobiography, he chose to

go to Chicago because it had an intense and strong intel-

lectual atmosphere that suited him well. Unlike some other

universities, Chicago had abandoned its heavy investment

in intercollegiate athletics—a change that also suited Simon

well. According to Simon, he had intended to major in eco-

nomics until he learned that in order to do so, he would

have to take a course in accounting. He switched to a ma-

jor in political science (Simon 1991, 39) and gravitated

toward research in public administration.

Simon attended the University of Chicago during the

Great Depression of the 1930s. It was a time of political

and economic unrest, and he saw himself, as well as other

students at the university, as “intensely political animals”

(1991, 119). In Simon’s case, however, these political in-

stincts were directed less into an enthusiasm for mass popu-

lar movements than into an administrative/organizational/

planning conception of the requirements of democracy. The