Order (virtue)

Order is the planning of time and organizing of resources, as well as of society.

Although order is rarely discussed as a virtue in contemporary society, order is in fact central to improving efficiency, and is at the heart of time management strategies such as David Allen's Getting Things Done.

The valorisation of order in the early stages of commercialization and industrialisation was linked by R. H. Tawney to Puritan concerns for system and method in 17th-century England. The same period saw English prose developing the qualities Matthew Arnold described as “regularity, uniformity, precision, balance”.

"Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time" is a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin in 1730, while he was 20 years old. It was part of his 13 virtues.

A darker view of the early modern internalisation of order and discipline was taken by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish; but for Rousseau love of order both in nature and in the harmonious psyche of the natural man was one of the tap-roots of moral conscience.

The Romantic reaction against reason, industry and the sober virtues, led to a downgrading of order as well. In art, spontaneity took precedence over method and craft; in life, the Bohemian call of wildness and disorder eclipsed the appeal of ordered sobriety – as with the cultivated disorganization of the sixties hippie.

"Latter-day attempts such as those of Deidre McCloskey to reclaim the bourgeois virtues like order may be met in some quarters only by laughter."

Sociologists, while noting that praise of order is generally associated with a conservative stance – one that can be traced back through Edmund Burke and Richard Hooker to Aristotle - point out that many taken-for-granted aspects of social order (such as which side of the road to drive on) produce substantial and equitable advantages for individuals at very little personal cost. Conversely, breakdowns in public order reveal everyone's daily dependence upon the smooth functioning of the wider society.

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Wikipedia