Prudence
by Robert Hariman
So we live after virtue. Good thing, too, many of us would agree. No more “good Christian gentlemen” with all their exclusions, expropriations, and private realms of violence. No more wise old men running the state into the ground. Nor do women have to be hemmed in by such names as Chastity or Prudence. You can still say, “Neither a borrower nor lender be,” but you will be talking to people whose wallets are full of plastic and whose retirement funds are floating in the stock market.
And yet the enormous environmental and social costs of modern industry, agribusiness, automotive use, and other sectors of an energy-intensive civilization continue unabated. Urban designers identify the relentless dehumanization caused by modernist development schemes that get almost all available private capital and public subsidies. Debates flare up over genetic engineering and vertical integration in food production, corporate accountability in other industries, monopoly control of communications media, and the lack of control over global warming. Then one September morning an act of rage explodes on the New York skyline, and the previously hidden costs of the American Century mount higher and higher. Such problems are characteristic of our time, in part because they reflect combinations of private interest, technocratic expertise, and global scale that devalue communal wisdom and public deliberation. If we understandably don’t want to live with virtues such as prudence, it’s not clear that we can live well without them. A similar paradox emerges in the intellectual history of the modern era.
Prudence never fails to disappoint the modern thinker. Despite its importance in classical and Renaissance thought, the concept carries all the marks of a simplistic, vernacular term that cannot account for the complexity of modern life, much less work productively within a modern system of explanation. Yet the revival of interest in the concept has occurred as modernity becomes ever more pervasive. Those scholars who have argued for recuperating the concept of prudence often have done so out of profound misgivings about modern patterns of knowledge and social organization. More to the point, the attempt to revive this concept and its antique intellectual style can provide a comparison case for identifying, and perhaps partially rectifying, failures of political concern and intellectual attentiveness that are characteristic of modernity.
The chapters in this volume consider how the concept of prudence can be used to revise political thought and action. None of the authors is in any way sympathetic to those who have invoked classical virtues to outfit a reactionary politics, although we can understand the fears of accelerated social change fueling that response to late-modern civilization. Nor do we believe that the human sciences will benefit from a restoration of classical concepts in their original formulations, although we can understand the desire for a stable and comprehensive theoretical vocabulary that no longer seems possible. If prudence is to be put to work today as either a means of explanation or a guide to action, then it has to be refitted for our time. This is the logic of postmodernism: moving beyond modernism by drawing on those symbolic materials and intellectual traditions that modernism had suppressed. The emancipatory interest remains, although now it is realized, not only through the expansion of rights for all, but also through a reconsideration of those limits necessary for optimal and sustainable human life.
As much as this volume is grounded in the intellectual history of prudence and inspired by the recent resurgence in work on the concept, it also brings a distinctive approach to the subject. Too often, the literature on prudence covers a great deal of old ground and appears more interested in cashing in a known concept than in discovering other formulations, especially those which might be particularly suited to problems or initiatives that define the politics of a postmodern condition. We need to review the core concept of prudence, but that is only part of the story. Indeed, our first assumption is that there is no one comprehensive account of prudence—Aristotle included. (Likewise, there is no need to give priority to any one of the words used historically for the concept—phronesis, prudentia, prudenzia—or to varied sets of aligned terms.) The concept is by its nature multifaceted yet useful only if tied to specific situations. The full sense of prudence should come not only from its core vocabulary but also from its activation as a field of possible articulations. So it is that there is particular value in taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject.
This commitment to a wider sense of prudence is reflected in a second assumption, which is that there has been a basic division within the history of prudence between an emphasis on rational calculation, on the one hand, and intelligible performance, on the other. The calculative tradition of prudence, which originated with Aristotle, has dominated modern understanding of the concept. The performative tradition, which was embodied by Cicero, has lived in the shadows during the modern era. We can recover this perspective in part by seeing how prudence is embedded in familiar social practices. Thus, our third assumption is that understanding prudence requires attention to how it operates through the communicative media and public discourses that constitute political community. By developing these assumptions, the study of prudence can be moved beyond artificially narrow boundaries.
This richer, more polyglot sense of prudence begins by taking seriously its relationship with the art of rhetoric. It is difficult to understand prudence as anything other than a mere trafficking in maxims as long as it is taken without regard for a social practice. Rhetoric was the traditional practice in respect to which prudence was most directly understood in antiquity, and both rhetoric and prudence were displaced by the modern reorganization of knowledge and power. As Lois Self has summarized:
Rhetoric is an art, phronesis an intellectual virtue; both are special “reasoned capacities” which properly function in the world of probability; both are normative processes in that they involve rational principles of choice-making; both have general applicability but always require careful analysis of particulars in determining the best response to each specific situation; both ideally take into account the wholeness of human nature (rhetoric in its three appeals, phronesis in its balance of desire and reason); and finally, both have social utility and responsibility in that both treat matters of the public good.
These largely epistemological affinities are the basis for a functional dependency as well: full realization of rhetoric as a reflective practice that contributes to the common good requires the qualities of prudence, which are developed as one gains persuasive skill, experience, and influence. This relationship holds not only for the individual leader but also for the society at large. This relationship is not a matter of technical competence and social engineering, however. As Victoria Kahn has demonstrated, a prudential social practice is not one in which virtue can be localized easily or power constrained reliably. The cultivation of prudence complicates the relationship between leader and citizen just as it complicates the relationship between virtue and power. These difficulties were reflected in the use of prudence in classical theory: it not only was discussed in treatises on politics, ethics, and rhetoric, but appears to have operated as a bridge concept between those different theoretical fields.
Prudence can be used to link various human sciences today precisely because it does not pretend to a universal cognitive rule. Scholars in classics, political theory, moral philosophy, rhetorical studies, and other disciplines have turned to the concept in the hope that it will provide a basic vocabulary (though not an objective method) for understanding varied social practices and for nurturing authentic relationships and sound judgments within a complex society overdetermined by many forms of expertise. But if these commitments are to be realized, prudence must involve more than practical reasoning. It also seems clear that full development of the concept will have to go beyond philosophical discussion to identify how it is embedded in characteristic forms of speech. The introductory and concluding chapters of this volume suggest the full significance of this approach: by indifference to modernity’s great themes of representation and subjectivity, and by reactivating more socially inflected forms of knowledge and agency, prudence articulates one version of the postmodern condition.
The chapters in this volume illustrate how this perspective
might be developed. As will be evident, each offers a distinctive
understanding of prudence that in turn can draw together
varied scholarly and political interests. This introductory
chapter will review the classical concept of prudence, identify
some of the difficulties involved in fitting prudence to
the contours of modern thought, and preview the individual
essays.
Classical Prudence
Consider these predicaments: (1) A city-state deliberates whether to prepare for war. Greater preparedness will mean greater security if the war comes, but the war might be more likely to come once their preparations are known to the enemy who will see them as an escalation of hostilities. (2) A citizen in the city-state who opposes war deliberates whether to produce military goods. Collective security is more likely to come from not producing arms, but greater personal gain can be had from their production. (3) A political leader who favors war considers how to argue that he should be allowed to negotiate a peace treaty. He can appear true to his beliefs or true to the role he desires, and he can risk losing his backers or the votes of the peace party.
Too antique, perhaps? Here are three more: (1) A city deliberates whether to finance continued suburban development. Greater growth has widespread economic benefits, but at the expense of urban infrastructure and quality of life. (2) A council member who opposes development considers whether to invest in real estate targeted for growth. More people would benefit from improvement of the urban core, while personal gain is more likely from continued development of the suburbs. (3) A developer who favors suburban expansion considers how to argue that she should be elected to the neutral planning commission. She can be true to her beliefs or to the role she desires, and she can risk losing her clients or the votes of the urban majority.
From the Sophists to Augustine, classical thinkers recognized that there is a distinctive mode of reasoning indigenous to the conduct of human affairs. This realm includes all the activities of politics broadly conceived, as well as the management of business and other social practices. Prudence referred to this necessarily general intelligence, and the term was used to justify and direct specific decisions about how to act in conjunction with others. By identifying the basic elements of this intelligence, the classical thinker hoped to equip decision makers to cope with conflicting criteria or inadequate knowledge. Aristotle provided the foundational description of this intelligence by contrasting it with four others—scientific reasoning (episteme), technical reasoning (techne), wisdom (sophia), and comprehension (nous)—in order to identify its core assumptions and central operations. As should be evident in the following summary, the features of prudence (phronesis) follow from the essential conditions for human choice.
Prudence is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good. As both such matters are always subject to dispute, they can be resolved rationally only through deliberation—that is, through reciprocal exposition, comparison, and evaluation of arguments that represent competing perspectives or purposes. Likewise, analysis of how others might act and determination of one’s own objectives each require consideration of what is good in general. Therefore, prudence is the determination of what is good for both the individual and others. Since it must culminate in action, prudence also includes the determination of how to achieve these linked ends in particular cases. Thus, prudence requires a knowledge of particulars that can only be acquired through experience, and this knowledge will be used most effectively as it becomes ingrained in one’s disposition to act. As a result, prudence culminates in character rather than technique. This character becomes fully realized when it incorporates other qualities conducive to effective action amidst disturbing circumstances on behalf of common goods—qualities such as selfcontrol and sympathy toward others’ predicaments. Ultimately, prudence accomplishes an integration of all the virtues sufficient for living well with regard to the full range of one’s needs and obligations.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? How nice it would be if all one had to do was to follow these precepts. Unfortunately, prudence is never equivalent to its axioms, nor can it be demarcated reliably from unrealistic objectives. If this program, or any other, had provided a universal, context-invariant decision rule for making good decisions (the Holy Grail of modernism), this book and many, many others would never have been written. There is an additional problem in the literature on prudence as well; one that is grounded in this basic difficulty of formalizing action. Scholarly discussions of prudence have for the most part been devoted to analysis and application of Aristotle’s exposition of the core elements in the concept. There are at least two good reasons for such redundancy: intellectual traditions have to be maintained across the years (and particularly so within eras indifferent to their content); and because prudence is something known through its application within a specific context, the many restatements are not so much redundancies as they are activations of its norms within specific fields of practical reasoning. The continual repetition of the same terms does seem somewhat depressing, however.
How often do we need to be reminded that prudence is the selection of the appropriate means to achieve a moral end, or that one should strive to coordinate personal advantage with collective benefit, or that the wise politician deliberates carefully before acting? And isn’t such advice like the proverbial “buy low and sell high”? The formula is obvious, but the whole problem lies in discerning which stocks are going to rise or fall, and the formula provides no help whatsoever in that regard. And even this is old news: Aristotle himself made a similar observation.
There is little need for discussing the classical model of prudence via yet another walk through Aristotle’s doctrine. Instead, we can take an approach he unfortunately left undeveloped, although he explicitly recognized it to be an important part of the task of understanding prudence. Recall the hypothetical cases mentioned above. What to do? One typical response is to look for rules: what would any rational person do in this situation? (Indeed, this step is crucial to any art or program for rational living—e.g., to distinguishing both rhetoric and prudence from mere cleverness [deinotes]—although it need not lead all the way to an apodeictic rule or deontological ethics.)
There was another approach familiar to the classical thinker, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have other individuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particular wise person—the phronimos— is not merely a heuristic device pertinent to a program of civic education, though it certainly can serve that important task. There is something about the nature of prudence that can only be captured through embodiment in the specific political actor. Indeed, rather than see the individual wise person as a specific case of prudence—although that certainly is a sensible definition— we might consider how the prudent decision maker is so because he or she has become a linking mechanism for joining rules and cases, universal precepts and particular circumstances. And by examining how prudence is articulated through such a person, we can not only recognize how it is nested into the idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of an individual personality but also discern the outline of its more general, impersonal operations in the flow of gestures, expressions, movements, persons, and events that make up the world of action. Prudential theory requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonal norms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the reading strategy for understanding a persuasive text.
As one example of how prudence is articulated through paradigmatic individuals, and of how it structures public discourse, we can briefly look at one of the classical exemplars of civic leadership, Pericles. Our knowledge of Pericles comes principally from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and there largely from three speeches. Of these, his Funeral Oration is a standard text for civic education, but the better speech for our purposes is his challenge to the Athenians in 430 to continue the war against Sparta despite their recent suffering and waning resolution. Bottled up in their walls while the Spartans laid waste to the countryside around them, the Athenians’ economic losses were accompanied by a devastating plague. Pericles, aware of their anger at his leadership and their desire to sue for peace, calls an assembly.
It is not surprising that his speech is not celebrated today, for it would embarrass the modern, liberal pedagogue. Pericles, paragon of the Golden Age of Greece, calls for protracted war on behalf of empire through appeal to cultural superiority, and he does so with “the view that greatness is selfjustifying, not dependent upon its social or human effects or its conformity to justice or any other moral standard.” In addition, we know that the war became a demonstration of the law of unintended effects (just as Pericles’ counterpart, the Spartan leader Archidamus, had prophesied), and that it ended with the conquest of Athens. Yet Thucydides makes it quite clear that Pericles is a study not in folly, but wisdom. Pericles is not portrayed as someone appealing to the Athenians’ baser tendencies, but as the “first citizen” who is contrasted with the demagogues who followed him. His “position, intelligence, and integrity” are such that he could “respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check,” and his foresight and policies are celebrated. Pericles’ speech achieves its immediate goal, and Thucydides argues that the Athenians would have probably won the war had they followed Pericles’ policies after his death. The best leadership requires a combination of foresight and the capacity to persuade in the present—as Pericles himself observes—and his successors (including Thucydides himself at the time) seem to have had one or the other. What, then, are the qualities of the person who does have practical wisdom—that is to say, sound and influential understanding about matters of policy?
Pericles’ oration provides an answer to this question. The speech can be read as two speeches joined together: one flattering the Athenians for their boldness and the riches it has gained them; the other checking those very tendencies to recommend restraint and continued suffering. As Robert Connor observes, Pericles’ “effectiveness derives not so much from his ability to express the characteristics and attitudes of his people as from his ability to counterbalance some of their tendencies.” This coupling of contradictory appeals is more than a rhetorical trick, however—more than a means by which the superior individual manipulates the masses. Since the people contain multiple tendencies, or since the same tendencies can lead to success or failure in different circumstances, we can see that leadership requires an ability to discern shifting probabilities and to adopt contrasting attitudes. The idea that the prudential person is balanced becomes an oversimplification, an easy metonym for a much more dynamic process of alternating contradictory impulses within oneself—and not just to resolve internal tensions but in order to counteract such alternations in others. Indeed, Pericles’ argument plays on the Athenian capacities for both boldness and discipline, with the leader capable of both attitudes. (Pericles’ call for restraint and resolve, which involved both continuing the war yet remaining in the walls, came right after he had led a daring expedition to the Peloponnisos while Attica itself was being laid waste.) The rhetorical trick of joining counsel with flattery is a linguistic resource for representing and enacting the deep structure of prudential action.
Once a figure has been declared a model of prudence, there is a tendency to see everything he or she does as some element of that ability. So, for example, we could note how Pericles confronts the audience’s anger toward him, and make something of this attentiveness to emotion and of his ability to face hostility directly. But we also should take care to identify those elements of prudence which could be used by anyone, including those not in the markedly secure position of a Pericles. A prudence fitted only to a rich, brilliant, experienced, self-confident, aristocratic supreme commander would not be of much use. One must be more selective, even while recognizing there need not be a strict alignment between some capabilities and positions of strength. The following analysis of Pericles’ speech will identify five elements of prudence: attending to character, recognizing limits on action, balancing contradictions, discerning mutually advantageous outcomes, and public performance. Of course, because prudence is operational only in specific circumstances, we also must keep in mind that there will be other features of this multiform intelligence that are not evident in any one instance of Pericles in action, or in all of the actions of any one exemplar.
What is central to Pericles’ argument in this case is his recognition of the Athenian character. Prudence is a study in character, but not only of the wise leader. The leader’s character can only be assessed with respect to that of other leaders and of the polity, and prudential analysis in a democracy is grounded in knowing the polity’s characteristic moods, aspirations, and actions. As Connor has pointed out, Pericles sees the same city in both the Funeral Oration and his speech on continuing the war, but he values basic qualities differently in each. The qualities that are worth dying for are also inducements to bad policies. Thus, prudence will require habituation and historical knowledge, not just to season the character of the leader, but also because that is how one learns about the character of the city. Furthermore, knowledge of character involves seeing the contradictory tendencies in any one quality, whether it be boldness, love of luxury, or naval power. One must be able to both appreciate and beware the polity’s most basic tendencies. Thus any Greek will know that Athenians are bold, but only the wise will consider how boldness can lead to both glory and disaster. Despite this critical sensibility, however, the attention to character also brings with it the idea that what once was arbitrary becomes fixed. There is no question of the Athenians now becoming less bold, or of living well without glory. They cannot undo what they have become, so the only question is how to live wisely as who they are known to be. As the apostle Paul knew, classical prudence cannot imagine internal transformation.
Thus the appraisal of national character is influenced by the broader tendency to think in terms of limits. Athens, city of boundless energies, is not exempt from Pericles’ observation that all things are born to decay. Indeed, it is just as Athens has exceeded itself that it becomes most susceptible to external constraints, for Pericles’ attention to limits is most evident when he is discussing foreign affairs and particularly the Athenian empire. Once again, one is free to act but not to undo all prior actions. “Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire. . . . Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it certainly is dangerous to let it go” (2.63). Here the affinity between prudence and political conservatism may be strongest, for Pericles implies that, over time, the distinction between nature and convention disappears. What once was arbitrary now is essential. Likewise, we can see that a sensitivity to limits and sustainability need not support progressive politics, as is assumed today.
The Periclean sense of limitation is not just a platform for one political ideology or another, however. It is a means for being rational. This rationality includes both the attempt for self-control amidst turmoil—recall how Pericles begins his speech by directly addressing the audience’s anger toward him—and more important, the ability to discern the elements of decision making in the situation. The speech begins by defining what is needed to be capable of action—and the definition follows an ascending series of necessary but insufficient qualities. It then reviews how the audience has been changed by its sufferings—that is, by the accumulation of constraints on its freedom and prosperity. At that point he makes the first positive appeal—reminding the audience that they are citizens of a great city—but with a twist: just as it is dishonorable to claim a reputation one does not deserve, it is equally so to not live up to the reputation one already has. Again, a powerful inducement to action is also a powerful constraint on choice. The Athenians are not only ennobled by their reputation, but also coerced by it. Reputation, like empire, is a tyranny, and not one to be overthrown. Even the most positive argument in the speech—the following analysis of Athenian geopolitical superiority— is embedded in this insistence that the capacity for action is limited by past accomplishments. Intelligence, we are told, is the capacity to discriminate facts from hopes, and political action is equated with accepting the burdens of empire.
My interest here is not the psychology of imperialism but rather the emphasis on recognizing limits even within an imperial state. The interesting thing about Pericles’ constant evocation of constraint is that he does so in order to overcome mere expediency. In this case, the conflict is not between self-interest and justice—which is simply not an issue in this debate—but between self-interest and honor. Ironically, Pericles’ speech is an appeal to constraint in order to tie the Athenians to what he believes is the normative horizon of politics: the obligations to one’s ancestors to uphold and enhance the fame of the city. All empires decline, but the highest obligation is to burn as brightly as possible in order to live for as long as possible in human memory (2.64). Mere expediency comes from serving immediate self-interest by taking advantage of the opportunities for lesser action in the present. Prudence not only sees the dangers in the lesser action but also looks for the correspondence between historical constraint and normative ideal. So it is that Pericles simultaneously defines Athens as an imperial state and advocates the strategy of staying within the walls despite the suffering entailed by that strategy. By accepting such constraints as colonial enmity, Spartan superiority on land, and their obligation to Athens’s reputation, the city can both see the wisest course of action and find the moral strength to stay the course amidst the pain and uncertainty of war.
This argument demonstrates the extent to which prudence is a mentality dedicated to balancing the contradictory tendencies in any complex political situation. Pericles’ policy stands midway between two strong tendencies in the city: on the one hand, by staying within the walls, it falls short of the Athenians’ characteristic boldness, which would goad them to pursue the Spartans and their allies wherever they might go. On the other hand, by continuing the war, it goes beyond the citizens’ current willingness to be done with their sufferings by ending the war with a treaty that would allow them to recover from their unexpected misfortunes. The speech itself moves through a series of similar oppositions. These include his resolution and the audience’s emotionality, public interest and private interests, short-term gains and long-term dangers, political action and apathy, present circumstances and future glory. As with any orator, he uses opposing terms strategically; as with any audience, we should keep in mind that he might just as well reverse the polarities on another occasion. This emphasis on balance, rather than on any one set of values, follows from the structural conditions defining prudence: the political situation is self-contradictory from the beginning, actions can only be based on educated guesses about contingent circumstances, acting at all requires others’ cooperation, and all this happens over time while encountering unexpected consequences of what one does do. Thus, Pericles’ use of contrasting terms in the speech generally involves not the displacement of one idea or value by another but a subtle blending of opposites in the interest of balancing a larger set of forces. Thus, apathy is contrasted unfavorably with political action but on behalf of staying within the city walls, which is itself based on his assessment of the array of geopolitical factors. This balancing act also highlights another important element in prudential thinking, which is coordinating self-interest with the public interest.
Pericles features the two motives prominently at the beginning of the speech, and they color all that follows because of their affinity with his subsequent distinction between politically active and apathetic citizens. Again, the contrast with the Funeral Oration is instructive. There the city flourished from the citizens’ pursuit of their diverse interests, while all were assumed to be fascinated with politics. But now Pericles recognizes the tension between the two motives, one that certainly would have been eating at many in his audience. The key to prudential thinking, moreover, is in seeing how the two can be joined. “My own opinion is that when the state is on the right course it is a better thing for each separate individual than when private interests are satisfied but the state as a whole is going downhill” (2.60). Pericles argues explicitly that the pursuit of private interest alone is self-defeating in the long run, while the only sure way to secure private goods is through the common defense. The validity of this claim certainly cannot mean much to one who has suffered greatly while seeing others benefit from the war, however.
Perhaps this is one reason why Pericles makes so much of the city’s place in history. It is in the pursuit of fame that the fortunes of the individual and the city are most thoroughly joined, and that is where individual suffering can earn its greatest reward. So it is that a speech beginning with the contrast between private and public interest can end with the claim that the real strengths of the individual and the city are identical. The validity of this claim may not seem obvious to a modern reader, but the point to be made is that Pericles turned to the context embedded in his culture that allowed him to articulate the strongest appeal to the idea of mutual advantage.
This appeal is twice handicapped today, because it also depended on Pericles’ own performance as an orator. Thus, he exemplifies a fifth element of prudence, which is its orientation toward performance. Pericles responds to the Athenians’ low morale by calling an assembly to deliver a speech. The performance embodies the political relationship between the leader and the people while it provides the basis for unspoken analogies as well. Pericles reasons with an audience defined by its anger, and he stands up to them as he would have them stand up to Sparta. He advocates private suffering on behalf of the public interest, while he exemplifies the private individual secure enough to take risks in public. Although Thucydides articulates the ideas contained in this speech across his entire History, they obtain their most compelling statement not as ideas but in the person of Pericles demonstrating his mastery of the political situation within the city and without. Indeed, the ideas themselves are not difficult, but the unraveling of the Athenian fortunes seems fated once Pericles dies. The city itself can never attain the coherence of its greatest political leader, and so oscillates between one extreme and another. Thucydides seems to say that Pericles’ speech provided a sufficient model for imitation: if others could have continued to perform as he did, the city would have prevailed. Instead, however, an inferior form of oratorical performance prevailed—the demagogy motivated by personal ambition that led to their collective self-destruction.
The Periclean example ends in additional paradoxes: if the highest form of prudence is exemplified in the individual leader, can the polity do as well? If the most prudent individual is superior to the rest, are more ordinary actors capable of successful imitation? If prudence is most evident in the leader’s response to actual events in specific situations, how can it be transferred to different circumstances? To answer these questions, we are led back into the complementary formulation of prudence as an impersonal mode of reasoning. This circularity is inescapable, but also of only minor concern, since prudence is not designed to be an elegant theoretical system. What it provides instead of logical elegance is the ability to flip from one cognitive set to another—from rules to exemplars, and back again, as it is helpful to reconsidering and thereby finding the better choice in a perplexing situation.
Likewise, the processes of imitating the exemplar and applying the rule mirror aspects of each other, and in each case successful use will require a reflexive awareness of the difference between the prior form and its performative embodiment in a specific place, time, and audience.
To summarize, prudence typically receives dual articulations as a set of rules and as an exemplary individual, with neither capable of wholly representing the other. Prudence is defined as both a form of intelligence and the qualities evident in the wise person. By examining Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles addressing the Athenian assembly, we can identify some of those qualities in the classical understanding of prudence. These include attention to the character of the political agent (whether an individual or a collectivity), according to a comprehensive awareness of the limits on action, in order to balance the inevitable contradictions within each situation, in order to discern those policies which will secure mutually advantageous outcomes, through successful rhetorical performance. Like Pericles standing before Athens in the Golden Age, prudence represents the ideal of the individual and the society advancing together rather than at the expense of each other. As demonstrated in his accomplished speaking, it is most evident in the “rightness of tone, sureness of touch” by which such ends can be achieved with minimal friction in actual practice.
Modernity and its Discontents
Just as performative virtues should appeal to those who appreciate political artistry, they are likely to trigger a shake of the head, a rolling of the eyes, or other signs of immediate though reasoned dismissal from others. As much as prudence was at home in antiquity, it is a stranger in the corporate structures of modern thought. Thus, to understand prudence today we also have to consider why it is not easily assimilated into prevailing modes of analysis, social organization, and philosophical inquiry.
The modern epoch runs from the Italian Renaissance and northern European Protestant Reformation, through the Enlightenment’s achievements in state formation and secularization, then to the democratic and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, and into the contemporary period of high-impact science and capitalist hegemony. This is not a clock that can be turned back. Nonetheless, those who look to a premodern concept such as prudence do so in part out of concern for how modern civilization can be harmful to human dignity. We begin by playing out a hunch: because prudence has been diminished within modern thought while those modes of political intelligence which have displaced it are proving to be dangerous, we might do well to step back and see just where things are out of balance. Prudence is rarely referred to or honored explicitly in contemporary discourse. Periodically, political elites will refer to it when having to rationalize inaction. (This usage was captured perfectly by the comedian Dana Carvey, who satirized President Bush pere by wagging his finger and saying, “Wouldn’t be prudent. Wouldn’t be prudent.”) Likewise, individuals will invoke the term from time to time when justifying flagrant self-interest or rank careerism. Although neither practice is completely at odds with the classical concept, much of the value and all of the complexity of that model are being avoided. What is more important, however, is the displacement of prudence by more characteristic and powerful forms of modern thought. The field of prudential judgment is now dominated by the complementary mentalities of political realism and progressive social engineering. Generally, realism is used to justify the behavior of individuals (including legal entities such as corporations and states), while social engineering governs the management of collective behavior. These patterns of justification share the assumption that rational action requires seeing through the distractions of culture in order to control material resources.
“Realist” analysis defines political actors as self-interested power maximizers, constrained by their resources for effective action to that end and regulated by their perceptions of others’ capacity to affect them in return. Political analysis consists in assessing all of the means for action according to calculations of gain and risk. By giving priority to material and especially coercive capabilities, and being suspicious of verbal statements, one can objectively determine the best possible course of action for survival in a world of force and fraud. This program for political thinking has the authority of a long intellectual history, and has repeatedly been proven to be a sufficient account of political conflict and success in particular situations. Nonetheless, realism can also be misleading, wasteful, and self-destructive. If there are universal elements of a political consciousness, they nonetheless are always inflected through the conditions of thought and action defining a given time and place. Although realism has operated as a useful model of political rationality, it is important to recognize that it can also be unrealistic. Because realism has supplied modern political thought with its dominant style for describing the world to justify action, these reservations ought to be taken seriously.
The erosion of prudence in modern thought is evident in the fact that “prudence” has been a watchword of sorts for realist advisers. This usage is not far-fetched, for both prudence and realism feature the rational control of one’s impulses in order to achieve self-sufficiency in a contingent world. The realist allegiance to prudence has often been honored in the breach, however. This is not surprising, since ultimately realism devalues some fundamental elements of prudential reasoning: neither the end of the good life in general nor habits of deliberation should influence realist calculations. In realist discourse, “prudence” is a shadow of its former self. It functions as a code word for a cautious or conservative politics, or as a rationalization when calculations falter, or as a rhetorical device for discounting “idealistic” and “ideological” appeals, or as a placeholder for what has been displaced. It is not appreciated as a fully developed pattern of reasoning. Indeed, “realists have been so successful in expounding their particular definition of prudence that in today’s philosophical and political discourse the prudential is regularly equated with the self-interested, even by people who do not share their philosophical assumptions.” Conversely, when a richer sense of prudence is evoked in this context, it can hardly avoid assuming the full dress of ethical doctrine. Prudence then is a counter to raw expediency, but at the cost of being redefined as ethical thinking in the political context. As ethics is a “monological discourse” trumping political negotiation, prudence reinstates higher values only by becoming inflexible. The political thinker retaliates by insisting on the autonomy of politics, now the realm of power as it operates without regard for any other value. Thus, the choice is between two deformations of the classical concept: flexible-because-amoral expediency and rigid moralizing.
At the same time that political thought was undergoing this transformation, politics itself was being subjected to a similar process. Politics appeared too messy and inefficient for the task of managing ever larger societies and their enormous appetites for consumption. Whether known as Fordism, Taylorism, modernism, bureaucratization, or any of several other labels, modern social engineering has long been recognized to be a boon to human life, capable of large-scale disasters, and unstoppable. Through the application of modern scientific rationality to the management of all material and human resources, both governmental and corporate organizations have achieved exponential increases in productivity and comprehensive investment within all areas of human life. From water to labor, industry to agriculture, architecture to urban design, and through every practice subject to accounting procedures, mapping, zoning, and a host of related technologies, the public space and common resources that once were the domain of politics have been remade in the image of a rational world.
James C. Scott describes the current phase of this process as “authoritarian high modernism,” which is “a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.” Scott demonstrates how such high modernism uses semiotic practices such as mapping to simplify social order into a series of abstractions, and then uses the productive powers of modern capitalism and the modern state to reorganize the world according to a norm of legibility. All resources are to be ordered for optimally efficient appropriation, while all other features of the environment are removed or rendered invisible.
As I sit before a computer that is drawing power from the regional grid, in a house heated by gas piped from thousands of miles away, and use a telephone that can call anywhere in the world. . . . Well, no one can avoid enjoying the benefits of modern civilization, and only a fool would deny what has been accomplished. But there is no free lunch, and exponential increases in productivity and innovation have their hidden costs. These include increased potential for systemic collapse, impoverishment of the subjective richness of social life, and trained incapacity to recognize the means to counteract these tendencies.
This last mistake is the one that points to the importance of recuperating prudence. Just as prudence becomes a lesser version of the classical concept within political realism, so it occupies a reduced role within modern social engineering. It then refers to the small set of compromises the system designer or manager must make to fit the system to the environment. Prudent conduct is that which gives in a bit here and there when encountering natural or social resistance to the system’s rational, legible design. One recognizes that Rome wasn’t built in a day, that a few deviations from ideal organization and optimal efficiency are actually low-cost ways to achieve long-term system dominance, that even though we could move the mountain and shouldn’t bribe the local official, such temporary restraints and petty irrationalities are cheaper than other, more systemic measures. Prudence becomes the set of minor techniques for accommodating system to lifeworld, though never a basis for reflecting on or changing the system.
This reduction reveals the Achilles heel of modernism. As Scott’s superb analyses have demonstrated,
These rather extreme instances of massive, state-imposed social engineering illustrate, I think, a larger point about formally organized social action. In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.
Furthermore, modernist social engineering, not only ignores “precisely the practical skills that underwrite any complex activity,” but does so as part of its comprehensive “strategies of control and appropriation.” Thus, any attempt to resist schemes of social legibility by cultivating the many forms of practical knowledge becomes a form of political opposition to the full extension of the modernist project, and perhaps a way to counter that project’s most dangerous tendencies.
A common denominator between political realism and progressive engineering is that they are most valuable to the weak, but most likely to be promoted by the strong. Indeed, the problems we face today are not so much with these doctrines themselves as with their hypertrophied development throughout the new imperium of global capitalism. Conversely, prudence is that mentality least likely to appeal to the strong, though perhaps most important for the maintenance of a worthwhile civilization.
The modern human sciences also see the world from a position of strength. From the towers of the research university, there has seemed to be little need to study cunning, learn the arts of reversal, and appreciate how the weaker argument can best the stronger, or to look for small affinities between ethics and effectiveness, limits and possibilities, and political ideas and modes of performance, or to consider how power and even justice may be misrepresentations of the actual practices of caring, self-sustaining communities. If willing to consider prudence, moreover, we have to grant that it immediately runs afoul of basic criteria of modern rationality: prudence antedates the fact-value distinction; it is difficult to quantify; it is largely retrospective; it is necessarily parochial; it is prescriptive; it is too general; it focuses too much on individual personality; it can be a stalking horse for political advocacy. Some of these criticisms are difficult for any theory to dodge (e.g., we never use quantification alone when describing human affairs), and some cancel each other— as when bias is attributed to right, center, and left alike. Some of them are instructive about the task anyone faces in identifying the elements of political intelligence: for example, any practical mentality has to be prescriptive at some point, while generality is often a resource when negotiating. Nonetheless, such objections will be sufficient reason for many scholars to overlook the subject.
One can address each of these concerns, whether by arguing that prudence does meet the standard or that no one meets it, but the problem runs deeper. Prudence really is different from modernist norms of explanation: it is a language game that gives no special priority to either of the two great axes of modern thought—representation and subjectivity. Prudent counsel and action does involve both representations of the external world and reflection on subjective experience, of course, but it doesn’t give any special priority to either form of consciousness, nor does it favor those procedures which provide optimal realization of either form. There is no cogito, no controlled experiment, no phenomenological method, no falsification rule. Worse yet, there is no hierarchy of decision rules. Contrary to the rational organization of a philosophical investigation or scientific research program, prudential knowledge is organized more in the manner of a crossword puzzle: one may begin at any point, will work with a hodgepodge of deeply enculturated cues, will have to integrate both formal constraints and factual knowledge from an enormous social field, and should know when to quit. A systematic theory of prudence would be a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps one reason the classical formulation of prudence placed such emphasis on the formation of character was that character is an example of both nonhierarchical organization and qualified reflection. In the figure of the phronimos, practical wisdom is grounded in a variable process of individual habituation, defined as a series of tendencies whose internal coherence is important though essentially idiosyncratic, and made a subject of reflection as the individual becomes engaged in a social field and especially in the activity of deliberation. Another intuition in the classical context might have been that it is important to hold to relatively limited or conventional conceptions of representation and subjectivity if one is to act effectively. (Such is the gist of the critique of speculative philosophy in antiquity, first by the Sophists of the Ionian philosophers and then by many Romans of the Greeks.) Politics depends on being realistic, but also on being attentive to possibilities that can be lost amidst extensive description of what is the case; rhetorical success requires strategic self-awareness, but also social adaptability and a willingness to speak out that can be paralyzed by excessive self-consciousness. Even so, it remains the case that contemporary formulations of prudence find themselves tied to limited versions of knowledge and selfhood that won’t garner much respect in modern culture. It is as if one were giving up philosophy for pedagogy, or Virginia Woolf for Miss Manners.
These and similar criticisms do not faze those scholars committed to recuperating prudence. The value of prudence to them stems in part from the fact that it does not meet the legitimation criteria of high modernism. Rather than strive to bring the classical concept up to modern specifications, they feature the concept because they believe the specifications need to be supplemented or changed. Modernism is seen, not only as a collection of powerful technologies for knowing and managing the world, but also as a futile and at times tragic attempt to make the world conform to one civilization’s rules for social order. Modern life has included unheard of expansions of personal liberty, privacy, self-awareness, and self-fashioning across all ranks of society throughout the globe. Yet people often are no wiser, less articulate, and trapped in the paradox that their happiness depends on social practices and rhetorical skills that cannot thrive amidst modern individualism.
Neither longing for the past nor another version of an endlessly projected modernity, prudence offers one version of a postmodern condition. In the studies comprising this volume, there is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present. Whether describing prudential performance, the texture of prudence, or other concepts advanced in the following chapters, the intent in each case is to identify some of those practical skills which underwrite the complex activities of public life. These essays cannot be comprehensive. They do aspire to show how prudence is articulated through both precept and personality, how the actual operation of this intelligence can involve subtle shifts from one form of itself to the other, and how these shifts leave their traces in the texts of public discourse. If some parts of this project can double as suggestions toward developing a postmodern culture dedicated to worthwhile and sustainable communities developed through wise use of diverse modes of expertise and experience, so much the better.
The Many Faces of Prudence
Through critical studies situated in major periods in the history of prudence, the chapters in this volume focus on the internal dynamics of the concept as they demonstrate how it operates discursively. The first group of chapters provide revisionary readings of defining moments in the history of theoretical reflection on the term. Robert Cape takes us back to antiquity, although not for another reworking of Aristotle. Instead, Cape examines Cicero’s use of the term as he developed the concept in his treatises on oratory and politics. Cicero elevated practical intelligence to the status of wisdom while at the same time breaking with the standard Greek methods for expounding ethical theory. Thus prudence was enriched by its exposition through the conventions of urbane dialogue, in utramque partem disputation, and speakers who were embodiments of civic leadership. These formal devices articulate a sensibility that is learned through imitation, valued for its social and aesthetic qualities, and realized in discursive performance.
A performative perspective always raises questions of sophistry and the misuse of language, which is where Eugene Garver begins his careful retracing of Machiavellian prudence. Garver focuses on Machiavelli’s negotiation of sophisticated logics of imitation in order to create a realm of appearance in which civic action becomes a middle way between ideals that cannot be realized and objectives that cannot be ideal. In such a realm, it is important to imitate not only virtue but necessity, and so to distinguish between both real and notional alternatives and artificial and natural limitations. Garver’s analysis leaves much of our conventional understanding of Machiavelli intact, yet it raises intriguing questions about how we might use his examples. In addition, Garver complicates the association of pluralism with liberalism while suggesting how prudence itself might reflect deep instabilities in modern politics.
The Renaissance may have been the high-water mark for prudence as a theory of political action; it certainly did not fare so well once the Enlightenment brought a radical transformation of the European philosophical vocabulary. Within that movement, however, the Scottish school developed a formulation of practical reasoning that maintained prudence as a model of the right relationship between knowledge and action. Peter Diamond details the careful distinctions by which Thomas Reid developed his philosophy of common sense. Diamond argues that Reid’s account of a situationally sensitive practical reason reproduced many of the key features of the Ciceronian conception of prudence, including its respect for tacit knowledge and belief in moral suasion. Yet Reid was also defined by the ideals of modern philosophy, including its suspicion of ordinary decision making, and so his own arguments held together only precariously, needing the prudential resources they were to discover.
By reconsidering prudence in respect to these three moments, we can discern how the history of prudence confirms not only the value but also the frustrations involved in trying to fit this concept to the contours of modern thought. In addition, these chapters provide both analyses of the internal complexity of prudential thinking and a general understanding of how the term is implicated in fundamental dynamics of persuasion and interpretation. These dual objectives receive additional development in the second part of the volume, which features case studies of representative figures in the history of prudential public address. These cases reveal how speakers drew on the forms of prudential reasoning as means of persuasion, and how the prudential intelligence only comes to full expression in the act of rhetorical performance. Thus prudence can be identified as one of the discursive structures capable of motivating collective action, and sometimes its outline can be traced through attentive reading of persuasive texts.
Edmund Burke, like Cicero before him, stands as one of the great exponents of practical wisdom and as one of the few figures to achieve prominence as both a statesman and a public philosopher. Stephen Browne examines the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in order to identify how Burke crafted a “discourse of virtue” that included a series of prudential maneuvers designed to counter imperial power. Browne reveals how Burke’s political thought acquires a palpable texture in composition—a “coarseness” that comes from working through speech to ground principles in historical circumstances and to act with the appropriate sense of timing that will preserve the political community. By heeding historical particulars and by discerning the proper pace of deliberation, the Letter appeals for active restraint of the operations of power, and particularly of the tendency to force conformity to abstract conceptions of order.
James Jasinski demonstrates how the great public controversies of the early American republic involved competing conceptions of prudential action that represented different sides of civic republicanism. Prudence became articulated in public debate according to a central tension between audacity and accommodation, each of which was the center for a cluster of terms that were used to describe and motivate political action. Jasinski traces a shift from an early alignment of prudence with the more audacious action, to an equilibrium in the constitutional period, to a preference for an increasingly calcified accommodationism during the slavery debate, to further reassertion of prudential audacity by the radical constitutionalists at mid-century. Jasinski’s account thickens our understanding of the dynamics of prudential imitation. Both audacity and accommodation were attitudes recommended to leaders according to the wisdom of the past, yet successful application in the present broke down as the tension between the two was ignored.
Christine Oravec’s study of nineteenth-century anxiety over the role of women in public address both widens the context of public culture and examines another key feature of prudence. Because the presence of women in the audience was both representative of the democratic public and inherently transgressive, it provided a litmus test of the force of propriety in prudential performance. Oravec’s explication of the “promiscuous” audience, the male critic, and a willfully imprudent female speaker reveals the conditions for public judgment that were emerging in the Jacksonian era. More important still, the feminized conception of propriety that developed became an important element in the constitution of bourgeois norms for public activity. Oravec argues that the conjunction of a domesticating propriety and a denuded sense of prudence remains characteristic of the mass audience that is presumed to be incapable of active participation in democratic governance. The corollary is that transgressive speakers in the manner of her exemplar, Fanny Wright, are essential for the restoration of a vital sense of civic life.
These critical studies exemplify how understanding prudence must include attentiveness to how it is realized within public discourse. The last part of the volume turns to the problem of situating prudence within some of the cultural practices and intellectual initiatives defining the early twenty-first century. John Nelson considers how the concept is alive and well, mutatis mutandis, in the genres of popular culture that people increasingly use as equipment for living in a complex society. This is a society characterized by the triumph of the social and a corresponding decline in traditional political participation, by ever wider democratization and the collapse of the public/ private framework, by the fragmentation of grand narratives and other forms of cultural legitimacy, and by a host of concerns that include moderating radical individualism and managing ecological crises. Through his explication of the arguments, principles, characters, tropes, stories, proprieties, judgments, and margins of prudence as they are elements of invention within popular literatures, Nelson outlines a vocabulary for a substantive theory of practical wisdom.
The second chapter in this section situates prudence within contemporary interpretive philosophy. By examining the appropriation of the concept by Jean François Lyotard, Maurice Charland is able to identify how prudence has been redefined by the assumptions of poststructuralism. Lyotard is fixated on Aristotle, but he begins where other neo-Aristotelian accounts end, and while rejecting the idea of community he crafts a pragmatics of acting and judging within the condition of radical plurality. Prudence is awakened when one has ethos without identity and has to judge without rules. Charland situates Lyotard within the tradition of prudence by carefully tracing this supplement to Aristotelian discourse, a supplement that is by turns Sophistic, committed to justice, defined via difference, and realized through performance.
My concluding chapter brings this perspective full circle to consider how prudence has depended on certain conventions of its articulation that can be rather arbitrary with respect to any moment of judgment. Along the way, I also rough out several claims for continued development of the concept. This articulation of prudence includes a commitment to sustainability through use of normative, calculative, and performative capabilities that together join personal agency and public judgment. Perhaps to suggest an affinity between prudence and folly, and as a final example of how prudence operates through public discourse, the chapter includes a discussion of Bill Clinton’s impeachment scandal. There is no definitive case or last word, however. A reflexive understanding of prudence ends by recapitulating incompleteness.
This lack of closure is a limitation, of course, and so a fitting place to conclude any discussion of prudence. Yet such an end is also a beginning, for if the human sciences are to rise to the challenge of articulating a postmodern culture worth having, they will have to do so by rethinking the very notion of limits. Modernity saw any limit as but a temporary obstacle, awaiting yet another great leap forward into an ever wider realm of enlightenment and freedom. A postmodern inquiry gives limits their due; its reward will be to learn how they also are liminal figures—portals into other worlds, some closer than we had realized, though perhaps not better but simply different. Prudence will always lack imagination, and typically pull itself up short of transformative experiences, but in doing so it might become possible to realize how happiness needs no more than to achieve what is always within our grasp.
© 2003 The Penn State University