An exploration of intelletualist and non- or anti-intellectualist approaches to practical action, focusing on the central role of tacit belief in establishing propsitional/rational foundations for political judgment and action.

Chapter 8 treats books XIX–XXII, the final segment of The City of God, focusing on the last end or summum bonum. In these key books, the antidote to pride, flowing from humility, emerges in Augustine’s narrative as “participation” – free and willing partaking by creatures in God’s being, wisdom, and love. Crucial to this participation, and the genuine community or res publica it makes possible, are recognition of humanity’s creaturely status and the rejection of the pull toward autarchy or a false sense of self-sufficiency.

Chapter 1 points to two problems with the deduction of the principle of the purposiveness of nature in the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The first is that it assumes that empirical knowledge must take the form of a comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy of empirical concepts – but does not explain why. Second, Kant creates high expectations by employing the demanding term "deduction" and promising to seek the grounds of the principle of the purposiveness of nature in the “sources of cognition a priori” – but appears simply to declare that finding a hierarchical system of empirical laws is a need of the understanding and that although we have no a priori insight into its existence “such a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed” by the power of judgment. The Introduction further emphasizes the importance of the notion of pleasure and its relation to our successful attempts to discover the conceptual order of nature. It also argues that the introduction of the aesthetic and logical aspects of the purposiveness of nature gives us good reason to think that the two principal parts of the book are concerned with the latter notion and its transcendental role.

Chapter 3 tackles the considerable exegetical difficulties posed by the antinomy of teleological judgment. Although the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment poses an antinomy between regulative maxims of reflective judgment, it also presents a conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment. This fact has led a number of readers to conclude that the latter conflict is the antinomy of teleological judgment and the former is its resolution – Kant’s explicit claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The chapter argues that posing the conflict between would-be constitutive principles of determinative judgment is explained by the attempt to assimilate characteristic features of a dialectic, specifically the fact that it ensnares ordinary understanding. Building on the earlier discussion of the distinction between explanation and description, it further claims that the regulative maxims of reflective judgment do not contradict one another, even as they are first presented, but in fact essentially complement one another. The maxim of teleology governs the description or observation of organisms as self-organizing beings; the maxim of mechanism directs us to seek to explain their generation and the processes they undergo mechanistically, just as all other causal processes are to be explained.

Are there systematic differences between the behaviour of politicians – such as ministers, members of parliament or elected municipal council members – and that of ‘the rest of us’? Are politicians in a ‘league of their own’ in terms of how they take decisions and make judgements? In the existing literature, there is no overriding consensus or clear majority of findings on these questions. We add to this literature by leveraging results from an experiment with two samples: (1) Dutch locally elected politicians (n = 211) and (2) students (n = 260). The experiment examined whether these two groups displayed biases related to the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic – two so-called general purpose heuristics – and whether they displayed the reflection effect. Our findings demonstrate that politicians’ judgements and decisions are largely similar to those of the rest of us, indicating that there is little evidence of an elite-public gap in this respect. Under specific circumstances, however, politicians do differ in their judgement and decision making. These differences may have consequences for the functioning of representative democracy and for policy making. It is especially noteworthy that in this study political experience or expertise did not reduce decision-making biases.

Chapter 3 addresses Edmund Burke’s role in the eighteenth-century reception of classical eloquence, investigating his provocative claim that disruptive, injudicious speech can act as a spur to sound political judgment and institutional health. While Cicero’s rhetoric and his model of public life celebrated risky spontaneity and was only loosely rule-governed, a range of Burke’s contemporaries argued that the rule-bound governance of the modern era demanded a complementary style of rule-bound speech: a discourse that was factual, restrained, dispassionate, and even happily mediocre. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made an important break with this line of thought, celebrating the sublime’s power to disrupt custom and ordinary time. His speeches and political writings built on this conceptual foundation, developing an account of the pain of judging and the allegedly defective deliberation that often serves to evade that pain, substituting rules and maxims for engagement with circumstantial complexities. Burke consistently argued that such deliberation is ultimately self-defeating and marked by a fatal lack of what I call “imaginative judgment.” Yet he also suggested that the rhetorical sublime – which might be excessive and even uncanny – was necessary to provoke the exercise of such judgment.

Chapter 4 turns to the historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay to investigate tensions between classical eloquence and the emergence of mass politics. Macaulay’s influential History of England revived the classical notion of history as a branch of rhetoric, as well as the classical practice of narrating political change through simulated speech. For Macaulay, writing history as rhetoric had a clear normative value: it was an effort to glamorize practices of political judgment that he saw as increasingly endangered by mass politics. While Macaulay contributed to the growth of political participation through his advocacy of the Reform Act, he also feared the ways in which mass politics might render political life less susceptible to classical norms of eloquence. His History is a response to this fear: an attempt to educate a judging public. The chapter concludes by contrasting his attempt with Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. In comparison to his contemporary Macaulay, Tocqueville fixed his attention on secrecy rather than publicity, long-term processes rather than charged moments of persuasion, and tragic necessity rather than deliberative contingency. Nevertheless, Macaulay’s historiography offers something that Tocqueville’s lacks: a temporally sophisticated account of rhetoric, in which the orator’s responsibilities include cultivating practices of judgment over time.

This chapter concerns the procedure for those rare but important civil disputes which proceed through the entire litigation process to judgment and, in some case, beyond. As this book has demonstrated, most cases settle prior to trial, which means that those cases which proceed through trial and on to judgment tend to be the ones with the most adversarial and persistent parties. However, for some cases, even judgment does not bring an end to proceedings. Judgments are considered final and enforceable as soon as they have been delivered, but they may also be incomplete and appealable and further disputes can arise after judgment. Appeals are a critical example of one of the key balancing themes in this book — being the balance between due process and efficiency.1 Appeals provide an opportunity to concentrate the hearing of the most legally difficult cases before the highest judges, which enables the development of high-level binding precedent by superior courts. However, appellate processes come at a high price for the efficiency aims of civil procedure as they require significant time and money.

Gadamer saw hermeneutics as heir to the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The exercise of phronesis, good practical judgment, helps sustain the solidarities upon which democracy depends. Phronesis is distinguished from techne, technical knowledge. Gadamer is critical of technocratic thinking. Phronesis is closely related to ethos. It has communal dimensions such that it invigorates the ethos of the society and makes possible solidarity. The basis for this is friendship. Friendship involves a life together of reciprocal co-perception.

Micah Watson argues that an active conscience is the outgrowth of the evangelical mind. Evangelicalism is the form of Protestantism that relies on the truths of historical Christianity while navigating between mainline Protestantism and fundamentalism. For evangelicals, conscience is founded in the Bible, particularly the writings of Paul. It also flowered in the post-Reformation world, where it was taught that an active conscience signaled a person’s salvation. Conscience also led evangelicals to be active against all forms of sinfulness. In the United States, this contributed to the proliferation of voluntary societies, where Christians who were “saved for service” could exercise their consciences to spread the Gospel or stamp out perceived evils (like alcohol use). Watson traces the history of evangelical conscience into the twentieth century, and he describes voices like Carl Henry and others who sought harmony between the pious strand of evangelicalism, and adherents who were committed to social action. Later in the twentieth century, evangelicals sought peace in society more than saving it. Still, evangelicals continue to oppose perceived social evils, including same-sex marriage.

Jeffrey Hammond outlines a biblical theology of conscience. A Christian conscience is an ever-growing, recalibrating capacity of the regenerated (converted) person. Then, through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, the Christian can seek to fulfill the great commands of the New Testament: to love God and love the neighbor. Working out these commands involves judgment of what to do in any given situation. However, in making any difficult judgment, the Christian is always aided by the “still, small” voice of the Holy Spirit, counselors, prayer, and the certain knowledge that the conscientious decision will always line up with the will of God as revealed in the Word of God. The redeemed conscience is one that is both bound and freed. The Christian is bound to follow the moral instruction in the New Testament, but at the same time, she is also freed to do it. The redeemed conscience is one that judges and will be judged by the God who perceives the deliberations of all consciences. The Christian, however, sensitive to the Spirit in both deciding and acting, can rest upon her decisions with a sense of equanimity and peace, knowing that she has faithfully exercised her conscience.

This concluding chapter seeks to reiterate themes and lines of argument, while laying a foundation for discussion and judgment about the place of intellectual property in our political communities today. To summarize: the modern nation-state system, powered partly by intellectual property law, is fundamentally an order of obligation, an organization of vast social networks, in which legal instruments with ancient roots performatively link people and organizations together with their national polities into a joint project of economic expansion. The social formation story that I have told in tracing the development of this system is one in which Roman law and Biblical law were drawn together under the authority of bishops and kings to support a very modern, and very strange, adaptation of Abrahamic faith traditions, an adaptation in which faith is placed in legality, and hope is placed innovation. A characteristic set of anxieties accompanies this modern faith tradition, anxieties that our nation will fall behind in the race for innovation, and will lose its fragile position of dominance in a global order of power.

The Critique of Judgment is concerned with “judgment” as a power of the mind that is expressed in particular acts of judging. This is the sense we draw upon when we say of someone that they have good judgment, or when we put our trust in someone’s judgment. I consider Kant’s regress argument concerning judgment in the Analytic of the Principles of the first Critique. Kant has been read as concluding that if cognition is to be possible it must, on pain of infinite regress, bottom out in some non-rule-governed, “immediate” act or entity. I argue that this interpretation misconstrues the moral of Kant’s argument, as it does that of the rule-following passages in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with which it is sometimes aligned. The point of Kant’s argument is that judgment must be exercised: this is its condition. Kant shares with Wittgenstein (properly read) an awareness of the desire that we may have to evade the exercise of judgment and the revelations of the self that it entails. Reflective judgment, as introduced in the third Critique, is a further development of the notion of judgment as necessarily exercised and reflective of a particular mind.