prudence

September 27, 2019|Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke, Greg Weiner, prudence

The First Virtue of Old Whigs: Prudence in Burke and Lincoln

Image of Abraham Lincoln from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19200 (digital file from original photograph) LC-USZ62-15303 (b&w film copy neg.) and Portrait of Edmund Burke from studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds oil on canvas, circa 1769 or after, National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 655

Weiner’s Old Whigs offers a persuasive account of how Burke and Lincoln negotiate the tensions between principle and prudence.

July 16, 2018|constrained vision, Jerry Z. Muller, judgment, metrics, prudence, Thomas Sowell

Measurement versus Judgment: On Jerry Muller’s Tyranny of Metrics

by Brendan Patrick Purdy|

Under A Western Sky/Shutterstock.com

We use metrics to assess everything, but measurement does not always equal wisdom.

March 26, 2018|Brutus, James Madison, John Pickering, Judicial Impeachment, prudence, Publius, Samuel Chase, William Blackstone

Restoring Judicial Impeachment

by Greg Weiner|

Warehouse of Images / Shutterstock.com

Reviving the old meaning of "high crimes and misdemeanors" would allow judicial impeachment on prudential rather than narrowly criminal grounds.

February 28, 2017|Clinton Rossiter, Presidential Historian's Survey, Presidential Power, prudence

Grading on a “Change Agent” Curve

by Greg Weiner|

Historians, as a profession, are understandably fascinated by change. Civilizations, as a phenomenon, are properly concerned with conservation. Tension is inevitable when the former apply criteria of success and failure ill-suited to the goals of the latter. The best recent evidence: C-Span has just released its Presidential Historian’s Survey for 2017. It is proof that historians celebrate Presidents the more change they achieve while consigning them to obscurity for governing prudently according to circumstance.

October 16, 2015|Administrative State, American Founding, Conservatism, David Brooks, John Adams, New York Times, Pinch Sulzberger, Progressivism, prudence

The Wrath of Cons

by Richard Samuelson|

David Brooks is in an angry and spiteful mood. Perhaps he’s even getting to be a bit unhinged, as history is putting his vision of American conservatism onto its rubbish heap.

January 23, 2015|41, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, prudence

The Preeminence of Prudence

by Greg Weiner|

Washington forgives many things, from Oval Office indiscretions to executive abuses. But neither laughter nor defeat makes the pardonable cut, and George H.W. Bush has endured both, in each case for precisely the quality that most commends him: prudence.

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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