Prudence and Populism

Prudence might seem the last virtue that should be consulted in our present climate. To some, it indicates timidity, undue caution, and a moral hesitancy to do the things that are most needed. Others associate it with cunning, the savvy achievement of narrow ends. These popular renditions of prudence need to be informed by its classical dimensions. Such an account of this virtue can improve our politics, guiding those who hold power to exercise it in all of its strengths and limitations. Prudence, Greg Weiner notes in his wonderful study, Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln, & the Politics of Prudence, “is the virtue associated with reason. It has, in this sense, a deeply normative case, which is to say that the point of prudence is not what Aristotle calls ‘cunning.’”