ABSTRACT
One of the things that struck me during the run-up to the war in Iraq was that so few asked the simplest of all possible questions: Was it wise? As a medieval historian I could not help but notice the omission and think about it, because in medieval writings on rulership – principally the writings we call mirrors for princes – wisdom was consistently regarded as the crowning virtue of rulers. Well into the seventeenth century, it was next to impossible to talk about political power without insisting on the need for leaders to make decisions based on virtues like wisdom and moderation. This does not mean that leaders were wise in judgments and moderate in actions. It does mean that political policy was discussed in such terms. At some point this stopped being true – at least it stopped being true in the liberal tradition of political philosophy that is one of our most important intellectual inheritances. Especially as it developed in England, Scotland, and the United States, classical liberal theory tended to banish ethics from public political discourse, relegating it to a private sphere of religion and belief. As a result, modern liberal theorists rarely look at premodern political theory, and never at early medieval political theory. There is, I think, a cost. Our understanding of the historical antecedents of liberalism is historically simplistic, and our understanding of political society is incomplete.
