On Political Judgment/Prudence and Realism

Abstract: I provide a basic account of political judgment/prudence and link this account to political realism more generally.

Political judgment is far more than prudency or opportunism, but fundamentally involves the attempt to reconstruct the world in one’s desired image. It is by its nature an exercise in evangelicalism, aimed at self-reproduction. What this means is transforming the separation of “experience” and “expectation” from a hindrance to future insight into a politics of radical creativity. Guicciardini, preempting theorists like Michael Oakeshott and Marc Stears by centuries, tells in his Ricordi:

It is a great error to speak of the things of this world absolutely and indiscriminately and to deal with them, as it were, by the book. In nearly all things one must make distinctions and exceptions because of indifferences in their circumstances. These circumstances are not covered by one and the same rule. Nor can these distinctions and exceptions be found writing in books. They must be taught by discretion.[1]

In a separate note, Guicciardini reflects upon the role of ambassadors in carrying out the orders of their princes: “It is impossible to give ambassadors instructions so detailed as to cover every circumstance; rather discretion must teach them to accommodate themselves to the end general being pursued.”[2] It is by no mistake that Montaigne, a contemporary of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, begins his Essais with the invocation that what the reader will find therein is the distillation of his pure “experience,” taken in distinction to mere speculation.[3] The first chapter of the Essais is entitled “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” and the readerfinds in his reading of history not the exemplars of Machiavelli’s imitative method, but all the “sound and fury” of infinite variations of human deeds, separate contexts yielding different conclusions to the same actions. Montaigne argues: “Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.”[4] Thus he compares the actions of Stheno, a Mamertine, whose valor against Pompey impressed the roman and persuaded him to pardon the city, despite losses felt by the legion, to Betis, the Egyptian general who, standing alone facing a horde of Macedonians, striking them down in succession, so infuriated Alexander that, once Betis was finally overcome, declared: “You shall not die as you wanted, Betis; prepare yourself to suffer every kind of torment that can be invented against a captive.”[5] From this comparison Montaigne comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to design strategic decisions prior to the experience of a concrete situation; history tells too many tales to tell anything beyond its ability to simply tell.

Later in the 18th century, launching his critique against the abstract levelling of the Jacobin revolutionaries, Burke developed a similar theme:

What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advice to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.[6]

The collapse of the a priori and the election of experience as the primary political modality, so central to Burke’s project, is further elaborated in the 20th century by Oakeshott, who extended conservatize theorizing into novel theoretical terrain. For Oakeshott, “Rationalist politics…are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by ‘reason’ and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”[7] The reliance of rationalism on the knowable techniques of “the book” produces a “misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind.”[8] Politics is the arena of the “art,” learned through concrete experience—what can be taught is so much detritus, useful only to the extent that it encourages a sensitivity to situational dynamics.

John Dunn elaborates this emphasis on experience into a rejection of routinization writ large: “judging what to do in the face of a disorderly world is not plausibly open to benign routinization of any kind,” Dunn argues, “And a genuinely deep understanding of its requirements…precludes the least susceptibility to comfortable intellectual routines.”[9] For Dunn, like Oakeshott and Burke, political “imprudence” is mainly a feature of applying inflexible and “myopic” schemes to diverse contexts.[10] Dunn thus develops a theory of “practical wisdom” in which he argues that what “modern politics most needs to recapture is a sense of the openness and the ineliminably problematic character of collective social life, of the complicated and imperfect nature of political and economic choices and of the universality of our responsibility for coping with the problem and choosing between the options that politics and economics present and will always continue to present.”[11]

Finally, it is Marc Stears that has most recently continued this theorizing of “practical wisdom,” nestled decidedly in a history of radical democratic participation in 20th century America. According to Stears,

The theorists of the twentieth-century radical democratic tradition continually insisted that it was wrong to circumscribe too tightly the actions that might be required in the present. The selection of political means had to be bot goal-oriented and context-sensitive. Such orientation and sensitivity further required that citizens—or at least citizen-activists—possess an astute sense of political judgment….Assessments of democratic political action in this tradition always thus existed at the intersection of principle and action, of ideal and strategy, and citizens need to understand the connections and disconnections between these ways of thinking. Radical democrats, then, demanded that citizens developed a kind of practical wisdom that would enable citizens to make these strategic yet principled decisions on a regular basis.[12]

Stears goes on to trace the development of this “practical wisdom” across the twentieth century, beginning with the Progressive movement’s cultivation of the “common good” as a stabilizer for disruptive forms of direct action. While the “Progressives were sincere in their desire” to fulfill a latent democratic promise and thus construct a more robust democratic good as an end result, “they were, however, also constantly aware of the obstacles that stood in their way and they sought relentlessly to find ways of overcoming these obstacles.”[13] The Progressive movement, having collapsed by the 1920s, gave way to a sociopolitical pessimism that drowned ideal claims to democratic belonging in the “worries about the here-and-now” confirmed by theorists such as Walter Lippman and Reinhold Niebuhr.[14] While the discourses surrounding the exercise of “practical wisdom” resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century, they did so having amputated the potential for coercion that earlier radicals deemed as acceptable in terms of democratic ends. Stears closes his analysis by focusing on how the new left and the civil rights movements further developed these radical democratic themes, concluding with a powerful summation of political judgment, wrapped to fit a democratic bill:

All democrats—whether deliberative or realist—must accept that it is at least occasionally legitimate to employ dramatic political strategies in order to pursue fundamental democratic goals against a backdrop of extreme injustice or exclusion. Thus there can be no sweeping rules in democratic theory as to the acceptability of particular political strategies at all times and in all places….What is needed, instead, is an assessment of particular recommendations for political action at particular times and in particular places.[15]

Stears’ self-styled “realist” position, like the contrasting position of deliberative democrats, takes seriously the question: “what is the relation between means and ends?” Clearly, for radical democrats, the problem of political judgment begs two questions: can we make the non-democratic democratic?—which is the sequel concern to the primary question: can we mine a democratic justification for non-democratic elements? When one justifies something democratically, is this, in consequence, to imply that the object of that justification is itself democratic?—another way to ask this is: can “democracy” only be composed of democratic elements? Implied in these questions, which splice a line between the normative and the practical, is the obvious realization that the means of a given movement will necessarily effect and define its goals—hence the deliberative democrat’s emphasis on the legitimacy of procedural terms. Stears would clearly say, as have radical democrats across the 20th century, that the contingencies and exigencies of concrete political action cancel all predetermined plans of control, and produce a fragile balancing act between the realization of a democratic end and the reality of local means; such go “the best laid schemes o’ mice and men,” as Robert Burns would write.

I have reproduced selections from these six theorists (Gucciardini, Montainge, Burke, Oakeshott, Dunn and Stears) in an effort to mine the true meaning of political realism, which I take as distinct from Schmitt’s reduction to a mere “moral psychology.” Rather, what these authors bring to the fore is the priority of the experiential over the a priori: to commit to political realism is to not commit to hardline political –isms.  While Stears’s retelling of the 20th century radical politics shows how self-imposed constraints may still operate within this rubric (and, indeed, the realization of any real democratic objective will require at least some bounded criterion), the greater point remains the adaptability of means to ends and the creative exploration of different modes of participation and practice. Thus we might say: the project of political realism cannot be disentangled from the effort of self-transcendence. Whether these forces find themselves in dialectical symbiosis or tension is another matter entirely.

[1] Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, p. 42

[2] Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections, p. 40

[3] See Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, p. 2: “I am myself the matter of my book”

[4] Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, p. 5

[5] Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, p. 5

[6] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 53

[7] Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 27

[8] Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 37

[9] John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility, p. 196

[10] See John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility, p. 200: “What is imprudent in modern political thinking is not any general aversion to precision or disinclination for closely considered instrumental calculation: very much the contrary. Rather it is our myopic sense of what needs to be considered, its insensitivity to the dynamics of relations between human individuals, groups and collectivities, its thin and impoverished grasp of the relevant causal setting within which human life now takes place. And, partly as cause and partly as consequence, the extreme difficulty which it experiences in thinking realistically about the nature and force of human values and their embodiment in the cultural and institutional substance of modern political communities.”

[11] John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility, p. 213

[12] Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy, p. 13

[13] Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy, p. 53

[14] Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy, p. 84

[15] Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy, p. 214