Scholar says 'prudence' has changed over time and cautions against treating realist policy advice as sole form of prudence

Harry Gold, an associate professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University, told a Hinckley Institute forum at the University of Utah that "prudence" is not a single, fixed concept but a cluster of historically shifting usages.

Gold delivered the Wormeth Endowed Lecture titled "Problematics of Prudence," tracing how definitions of prudence have varied from classical accounts that link it to moral judgment to modern usages that treat it as a skill or a risk attitude. He warned that contemporary commentators who claim exclusive custody of the term—especially in debates over responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—overlook competing traditions that attach moral content to prudential reasoning.

Gold said the variation in meaning is not a problem to be erased by a tidy operational definition. Quoting Nietzsche and scholars of conceptual history, he argued that "only that…