I want to continue the theme of efficiency and effectiveness by citing a passage from Isaiah Berlin's essay on "Political Judgement:" Bismarck understood something which let us say, Darwin or James Clerk Maxwell did not need to understand, something about the public medium in which he acted, and he understood it as sculptors understand stone or clay; understood, that is, in this particular case, the potential reactions of relevant bodies of Germans or Frenchmen or Italians or Russians, and understood this without, so far as we know, any conscious inference or careful regard to the laws of history, or laws of any kind, and without recourse to any other specific key or nostrum – not those recommended by Maistre, or Hegel or Nietzsche or Bergson or some of their modern irrationalist successors, any more than those of their enemies, the friends of science. He was successful because he had the particular gift of using his experience and observation to guess successfully how things would turn out.
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