“To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it is to be blind and to mislead others,” as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgment. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgment applies more broadly: judgment is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, “a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together.”7 A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely
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