In his column today surveying Edward Kennedy's Senate career in 900 words, David Brooks contrasts the visionary and (to Brooks) radical agenda Kennedy articulated at the 1980 Democratic convention with his pragmatism (and therefore successes) in the ensuing decades. Brooks writes: "There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together."
Brooks has in other columns emphasized pragmatism, incrementalism,and compromise (small ideas, not grand ones) as the path to change -- certainly nonviolent change. Michael Ignatieff, now a leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, formerly a politics professor at Harvard, expressed a related notion in a NY Times Magazine article (August 2007) in which he explains how he came to get Iraq wrong (supported the war as an academic, now opposes it as a politician). I quote a pargraph in chapter one of my casebook and set out that paragraph and two more after the jump below. Ignatieff relies on Isaiah Berlin, who famously said (relying in turn on Archilochus) that "the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." I am myself a fox. It's ingrained. It's not a choice.
What does this have to do with being a lawyer and legal education? I can only imagine the dissonance students must encounter as they move from the increasingly theoretical world of a U.S. JD education to the very practical world of client representation, as law schools have increasingly become more like graduate schools, less like the professional schools they once were, while subcontracting practice oriented teaching to adjuncts or clinicians.
Unless you're a frequent practitioner in the Supreme Court, or to a lesser extent in federal circuit courts or a state's highest court, most of what lawyers do is quite "contextual" and highly dependent on knowing "how to bring people together." That's even true for trial work. Effective representation of clients depends on the qualities Brooks attributed to Kennedy as a working Senator.
Should we worry about this?
Here's Ignatieff:
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can't afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
I've learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.
The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. ''What is called wisdom in statesmen,'' Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, ''is understanding rather than knowledge -- some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.'' Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq -- or anywhere else -- as it is.