The Concept of Political Judgment

Abstract

What is good political judgement? Is it a science subject to strict standards of logic and inference, or is it something more like an art, the product of intuition, feeling, or even chance? Peter J. Steinberger shows how the seemingly contradictory claims of inference and intuition are reconciled in the concept of political judgement. Resting his argument on the larger notion of judgement itself, Steinberger develops an original model of how political judgements are made and how we justify calling some of them good. He lays the groundwork with a discussion of the ideas of Machiavelli, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Oakeshott on the nature of politics. Turning to the philosophic arguments of Kant, Gadamer, Grice, and Wittgenstein, he formulates a model of judgement as intelligent performance, incorporating both intuition and rational reconstruction. Steinberger's conclusion - that a coherent political society must also be a judgmental one - is opposed to much contemporary thinking.