Statecraft

28 September 2026 · method

The gift of discernment

Prudentia as the concept Statecraft was still missing

by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands →

I. A word that was missing

The synthesis of Series I named what the dissociated organisation has lost as substantive weight.1 In an earlier essay I called it the discriminating eye: the capacity to make distinctions that disappears the moment a culture stops making them.2 Both formulations circle a capacity without calling it by its name. On 17 December 2025 Beatrice de Graaf and Rik Peels did name it, in the instalment of their NRC series on political virtues devoted to prudentia, the last of the four cardinal virtues they discuss. Their rendering is the best I know: the gift of discernment.3

Their target is the talk show. Political debate judges politicians on being clever and adroit: the good spin, the deft riposte, the opponent checkmated. De Graaf and Peels ask the question that cannot be asked in that vocabulary: is something that is clever or adroit thereby also wise? Their answer, via Thomas Aquinas, is that prudentia is not about how shrewd someone is, but about what the shrewdness is aimed at. Augustine had put it more sharply eight centuries earlier: prudence is love choosing with sagacity what helps it over what hinders it.4 Their test follows from that: a piece of political spin serving an end that shows genuine care for the whole community was good spin. Johan Remkes’s 2022 report on the nitrogen crisis, Wat wel kan, with its hard choices and its broadly shared sense that the recommendations served the community, is their example.5

Prudentia, contrary to what the name suggests, is not caution. It is the capacity to discern, in a concrete situation, at a particular moment, in a specific place, under unique circumstances, what good action is. It is the virtue that makes the other virtues applicable: it finds the mean between cowardice and recklessness, between cynicism and credulity. The scholastics called that the mean of reason. For Statecraft this is the concept that was still missing, because it names precisely what an organisation can lose while all its parts remain intact.

II. Eight parts, one capacity

Thomas Aquinas builds the virtue out of eight integral parts: memoria, intellectus, docilitas, solertia, ratio, providentia, circumspectio and cautio.6 De Graaf and Peels name four of them. For Statecraft the full list is an instrument, because each part has an institutional address, and because the series have documented the loss of each part without knowing that they were describing one virtue in pieces.

Memoria, the accurate memory of what has happened before. The address is institutional memory, and Series I Nº 06 described how that memory, with four directors-general in ten years and five municipal secretaries in seven, no longer lives in the organisation but in the market — down to the state advocate who, according to the Silvis committee, maintains an institutional memory the State itself no longer keeps.7

Docilitas, the capacity to take other people’s knowledge seriously. The address is advice, and The dissociated legislator counted the heavy opinions of the Council of State delivered, published and ignored without adjustment between 2022 and 2025. An institution that asks for advice and does not follow it has preserved the form of docilitas and lost the virtue.

Providentia, foreseeing the consequences of an action. The address is the implementation test, and the Temporary Committee on Delivery Organisations established in 2021 that motions and amendments are structurally not tested for it.8

Circumspectio, attention to the concrete circumstances of the case. The address is individual assessment, and The advice that was never written showed how a generic policy line takes the place of judging the case, in asylum policy as earlier in the childcare benefits scandal.9

Cautio, knowing what can go wrong. The address is the exercise, and central government rehearses its crises in two-hour sessions after which everyone goes home feeling good.10

Solertia, sizing up a situation quickly and correctly. The address is the first week of every interim assignment, and of every new executive who does not yet know their organisation.

Ratio and intellectus, reasoning from a principle and grasping the principle itself. The address is the law that still knows its own purpose, and the orphaned-design series described the law that no longer does.11

What this list makes visible is that an organisation can lose one part and preserve the ritual of the whole. The advice is still requested, the test is still mentioned, the exercise is still held, the memory is hired in. That is exactly what dissociation means in Series I: the parts exist, the coupling is gone. Prudentia is the name of the coupling. It is not a ninth part beside the eight; it is what makes the eight into one capacity, and it is what disappears without any one of the eight visibly being absent.

III. Why this is not moralising

The temptation is to turn this into a moral appeal: politicians should become more prudent, civil servants wiser. De Graaf and Peels address the talk show and the podcast, and that is their terrain. Statecraft addresses the architecture that produces what the talk show rewards.

In a person a virtue is a trait of character. In an institution a virtue is a set of positions that carry the parts, and a set of rules that give those positions consequence. Who remembers, and stays long enough to be able to? Who advises, and must their advice be answered? Who foresees the consequences, and can they hold up the vote until that has been done? Who is allowed to say no? The dissociated organisation has the positions and not the consequence. The MP who says something is not allowed under the law is not imprudent as a person; they have been produced as a spokesperson by an architecture that no longer brings the parts of prudentia together.7 A moral appeal to them does not change the architecture.

That is also why De Graaf and Peels’s two examples are so well chosen. That British parliamentary reports reproached the banking sector after 2008 for a lack of prudence is not about the intelligence of bankers; it is about a sector in which the parts of judgement — memory, foresight, knowing what can go wrong — had been institutionally decoupled from the decision. And that South Africa in the 1990s chose truth and reconciliation commissions rather than tribunals was not one leader’s personal virtue. It was a design that put the concrete circumstances of the case above the principle of retribution. Prudentia in an institution is a design choice.

IV. What does not work

The standard reflex to any shortfall in judgement is more rules: integrity codes, virtue training for civil servants, a due-care test in the legislative process. Applied to prudentia that reflex is self-defeating, for two reasons.

The first is that the virtue is needed precisely where the rule does not decide. Aristotle already knew that the particular is not contained in the general; prudentia is the capacity to act where the rule is silent or errs. An organisation that puts a rule on every shortfall in judgement enlarges the domain in which judgement is needed and shrinks the number of people still permitted to exercise it.

The second is that a virtue cannot be audited. Michael Power described how the audit society replaces every capacity with the accounting for that capacity.12 A prudentia test would within a year produce prudentia reports, and those reports would be the performative maturity described in Series I Nº 08: the organisation demonstrating that it judges, instead of judging. Auditing judgement is itself the replacement of substance by form.

V. Three design choices

What can be done is to protect the positions that carry the parts and restore the consequence that makes them one capacity. Three choices, none new in itself, each giving a part of the virtue its address back.

The first concerns memoria: terms of office and a master-apprentice architecture above department level, as worked out in Nº 06, so that memory lives in the organisation again and not in the contracting market. An organisation that rents its memory cannot discern what it has seen before.

The second concerns docilitas: consequence for advice. A hearing with the Advisory Division on every heavy opinion, before the first round of debate, makes advice into something that must be answered. Docilitas is not obedience; it is the duty to show that one has listened.

The third concerns circumspectio and cautio: the exercise regime from the orphaned-design series, the working form in which the concrete case returns to the table that made the rule, and the exercise that only ends once something has been found.13 Judgement stays in use; what stays in use does not corrode.

The design rule under all three is the same. The human urge to hide behind the rule is neither denied nor forced, but redirected through a design in which judging pays more than complying. That is not a call for courage. It is a change in what the organisation rewards.

VI. The open question

Can prudentia be designed, or only selected for? Augustine’s definition contains two parts: love and sagacity. The sagacity can be organised, in positions, terms and consequence. The love — the care for the community as a whole that made Remkes’s spin good spin — cannot. A state cannot love. It can only leave room for people who do, and stop punishing them.

What I suspect, and cannot prove, is that the dissociated organisation does not have a shortage of prudent people. It has selected them out of the positions where the parts of judgement come together, because whoever knows too much becomes unmanageable, and it has found them again in the contracting market, where they sell their judgement by the assignment to the organisation that could not keep them.14 The open question is not whether the gift of discernment exists. It does. The question is whether an institution can learn again to keep it.

Colophon

“The gift of discernment” is a Statecraft method paper in the line of Series I (Dissociated organisations) and the orphaned-design series. It takes its occasion from Beatrice de Graaf and Rik Peels’s series on political virtues in NRC (November 2025 onwards). The concept of prudentia is deployed here not as a moral appeal but as an analytical instrument: the name of the coupling between the parts of judgement that the dissociated organisation has lost.

Responses and counter-argument via Statecraft.nl.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with over twenty years’ experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and at regional partnerships in the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public delivery, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Footnotes

  1. Statecraft, Series I Nº 09, Synthese: het herstel van inhoudelijk gewicht, 20 April 2026. ↩

  2. Jacob Huibers, Het discriminerende oog: over wat verloren gaat wanneer een cultuur ophoudt onderscheid te maken, Nourishment (House of Viridian), 28 April 2026, nourishment.houseofviridian.org/het-discriminerende-oog. ↩

  3. Beatrice de Graaf and Rik Peels, Nieuwe politiek is niet slim en handig, maar prudent, NRC, 17 December 2025; earlier in the same series: Met gematigdheid trekken we het politieke debat uit de puberteit, NRC, 7 November 2025. ↩

  4. Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae I, 15, 25; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 47, aa. 1-5. ↩

  5. Johan Remkes, Wat wel kan. Uit de impasse en een aanzet voor perspectief, 5 October 2022. ↩

  6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 49, aa. 1-8. ↩

  7. Statecraft, Series I Nº 06, De reproductie naar binnen, 30 March 2026; De gedissocieerde wetgever, 5 May 2026, section V. ↩ ↩2

  8. Temporary Committee on Delivery Organisations, Klem tussen balie en beleid, parliamentary paper 35387, no. 2, 2021. ↩

  9. Statecraft, Het advies dat niet werd geschreven, 12 May 2026. ↩

  10. Ot van Daalen, Voorbereid. Zo zien de grootste Nederlandse rampscenario’s eruit, POM.press 2025; Marjolein van Trigt, interview with Ot van Daalen, Binnenlands Bestuur, week 49, 2025. ↩

  11. Statecraft, Orphaned design, De lege wet, 26 July 2026. ↩

  12. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford University Press 1997; Statecraft, Series I Nº 08, De performatieve volwassenheid, 13 April 2026. ↩

  13. Statecraft, Orphaned design Nº 05, Oefenregime, 26 July 2026. ↩

  14. Statecraft, Coda, De zondagavond, 29 April 2026, section 02. ↩