Top Highlights

• Edmund Burke warned that in poorly ordered democracies, “moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors.”
• What need is there for virtue and responsibility when you have all the answers and only need to enforce them? One result is that we demean in the first resort those who are our fellow citizens merely because we are locked in disagreement.
• Prudence, Burke held, is “the god of this lower world.”
• Aristotle argues that it is a “habit concerned with action under the guidance of reason.”
• The opposite of prudence is the god of abstraction and rationalist certainty, leading us to project ideological rigidity and rashness, if not violence, in political debate.

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