This book was conceived as a theoretical account of human judgment, the offspring of a traditional marriage of political philosophy and intellectual history. In time, however, it came to benefit from a broader parentage. In the end, it might be considered a child of miscegenation.

During the book's long gestation, I was often subject to doubts of the sort first voiced to me by an applicant for a faculty position in my department. This young political theorist had written a paper on judgment as a preamble to his doctoral thesis some years earlier. It seemed promising work. His dissertation, I now learned, was on a completely different topic. Why, I asked, had he changed course? He answered that he found the question of judgment inherently interesting and of great significance to moral and political thought. But after examining the available literature on the topic, he found himself with little to add, and, what was perhaps more disconcerting, with few enduring intellectual achievements to build upon. Practical judgment, he held, was simply too enigmatic a faculty to allow much in the way of cogent theorizing.

This widely shared experience helps explain the relative dearth of scholarship addressing practical judgment in the 2,500-year history of moral and political thought. If we continue the millennia-old search for the “Holy Grail of good judgment,” recent scholars have concluded, we do so not because there are reasons to expect success, but because giving up hope is unconscionable.