Politics is a craft or skill, and ought precisely not to be analysed, as Plato's Socrates assumes, as the mastery of a set of principles or theories. This does not imply that political agents do not use theories. Rather, part of their skill depends on being able to choose skilfully which models of reality to use in a certain context, and to take account of ways in which various theories are limited and ways in which they are useful or fail. The successful exercise of this skill is often called "political judgment." Thus, to give one recent example of the exercise of such judgment, many of the supporters of the Second Gulf War argued that at the end of World War II the United States was able successfully to impose a democratic political form upon Germany and Japan once they were defeated militarily, and both of these countries eventually prospered under this externally imposed regime; the same, they argued, could be true in Iraq. Some opponents of the war argued that the relevant analogy was Vietnam: as soon as Saddam Hussein was toppled, the various religious and ethnic groups who constituted the population of Iraq would begin fighting, and the United States would find itself in the middle of a civil war that it would not begin to understand and from which it would find it impossible to extract itself without heavy loss of life and international standing. Beforehand, it was perhaps not obvious which analogy would turn out to be the right one. In retrospect, given the outcome of the invasion of Iraq, it should now be clear that the first of these two arguments was mistaken, but even now it is an open question in which particular respects the analogy did not hold. Political judgment means, among other things, the ability to determine which analogies are useful, which theories abstract from crucial aspects of the situation. No further theory will help you avoid the need to judge.
(Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics [Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008], 97-8 [italics in original; endnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: Geuss can't get things right even in retrospect!
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 