In any given community, politics is the business of attending to the community's overall well-being, and the practitioners of politics will be most visible—and badly needed—when the aims or purposes of the community are in dispute. One who engages in politics must of course have some conception of what these aims or purposes are; without such a conception, political activity would literally be pointless. In arriving at his own views, however, and in attempting to guide the community by them, it is essential that he exercise good judgment—which here, as in first-personal deliberation, requires both sympathy and detachment and the ability to combine the two. Before he decides in which direction his community should move and how current controversies about its future ought to be resolved, any would-be leader must survey the alternatives, place himself imaginatively in the position of each of the controversialists, and make an effort to see matters from their point of view. He must entertain their concerns in the sense suggested earlier. The different possible futures that an institution faces at every critical juncture in its history resemble the different ways of life between which an individual must choose at certain decisive moments in his own career. In the former case, as in the latter, what deliberation requires above all else is the effort to see each of these futures in its best possible light.
Once this has been done, of course, a decision must still be made. But the standard by which we assess the wisdom of the choices in which deliberation terminates is the same here, in the political realm, as in first-personal matters. It is the mark of a wise or statesmanlike political decision that it enables the members of a community—its constituent parts—to live together in fellow-feeling despite the real differences of opinion that have divided them in the past and that will undoubtedly continue to divide them in the future. Put differently, it is the sign of a wise political judgment that it promotes community, not through the construction of a false and unattainable unanimity, but in the only way that human beings with strongly divergent interests are ever likely to achieve it: by strengthening the capacity of each to entertain the views of those with whom he disagrees, a capacity that has traditionally gone under the name of political fraternity. Fraternity is at once something less than unanimity and more than tolerance; like the midway attitude of sympathy, it belongs between these extremes of identity and indifference. Among the members of a community, we might say, fraternity is the analogue of integrity in the soul of a single person. Those who know how to achieve these two related goods, and who have the desire to do so, may, with as much justification in the one case as in the other, and for essentially similar reasons, be said to exhibit the virtue of good judgment.
(Anthony T. Kronman, "Living in the Law," The University of Chicago Law Review 54 [summer 1987]: 835-76, at 860-1 [footnotes omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 