Historians do not write books about what did not happen; prudence is not the stuff of which legacies are made. It is easier simply to celebrate the daring man of action, the hitter who racks up the runs.

Prudence as Excellence: 

Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln 

and the Problem of Greatness

by Greg Weiner

Our conference is subtitled “equality and the survival of heroism.” My concern is the survival of prudence amid the longing for heroism—in particular, the misalignment between ambition and circumstance, the persistent pursuit of legacy, especially by presidents. We live in a democratic age. Whence greatness if it is also anordinary age? In that case, I would argue that Edmund Burke offers a way forward: prudence as a form of excellence. The problem of greatness to which my title refers is the confusion of greatness with change and the equation of change with power. This formulation leaves inadequate room for what Burke called the queen of political virtues—prudence. The beauty—the excellence, I would argue—of Burkeanism, like baseball, often consists in the negative space, the prudent prevention of action, or in the careful calibration of action to circumstance, rather than in the volume of activity alone. This is difficult to capture and, crucially, to communicate. Historians do not write books about what did not happen; prudence is not the stuff of which legacies are made. It is easier simply to celebrate the daring man of action, the hitter who racks up the runs.

Yet there are limits and risks to this conception of excellence. I want to suggest that the manner in which we often calculate or celebrate greatness today stands in tension with Burkean prudence. Burke’s prudence emphasizes caution, gradualness and rootedness in the concrete. Greatness, by which I mean the contemporary standard of greatness, emphasizes daring, suddenness and sweeping abstraction. Yet there is an excellence to prudence. It requires excellent qualities: self-discipline, self-knowledge, humility. The difficulty lies in the fact that we celebrate these qualities in private life but tend to repudiate them as failure in political life. In politics, we glorify hares but have little use for tortoises. We remember Presidents who stretched their power to its breaking point and sometimes beyond; those who declined to exercise it out of prudential or constitutional concerns are stigmatized as failures. Greatness, meanwhile, is inextricably linked with crisis: Our great statesmen are those who lead us in times of disaster or war. We ought not therefore to be surprised if leaders ambitious for greatness are also in the market for crisis. Whether the times present one or they manufacture one is an ancillary question.

Burke presents an alternate model: prudence as a form of excellence. If that seems like an oxymoron—prudence is associated with moderation and excellence with superlatives—I will take that as simple confirmation of the problem I hope to diagnose. If we are to hear Burke, we must become accustomed to looking not merely for greatness but for excellence, for if prudence is a form of excellence, then excellence and greatness are not necessarily the same thing.


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