In a time like our own, with its routine storms of controversy and spasms of outrage, a classical virtue like prudence may feel either quaint or hopelessly irrelevant. Among much else, Greg Weiner's concise and elegant “Old Whigs” is a study and celebration of prudence, “for whose recovery,” the author believes, “contemporary politics aches.” He finds this now-uncommon virtue everywhere on display in the thought and statesmanship of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, the Whigs of his title.
But what is prudence? To Mr. Weiner, it “involves a carefully choreographed dance between principle and circumstance.” Far from seeking an earthly paradise, the prudent leader pursues gradual reform. Wise statesmanship rejects the extremes. But while the prudent leader is often cautious, he is not timid. “The key to prudence,” Mr. Weiner writes, is “having the capacity of judgment that can distinguish between ordinary moments and genuine crises and, in either case, calibrating action to proper goals.”
Both Burke and Lincoln indeed personify prudence, but at first they seem an unlikely pair. They made their name in different eras; Burke died a dozen years before Lincoln was born. Burke was born in Dublin, the son of a lawyer, Lincoln in a Kentucky cabin built by his illiterate father. The Irishman became a tribune of the aristocracy, the American a champion of the common man. Lincoln didn't read Burke; rather he admired Thomas Paine, Burke's great rival.
