“Not men, but measures”: The origins and import of an ideological principle

This essay suggests that our insistence on “sticking to the issues” in political argument is an ideological commitment rather than the dictum of logic. The idea originated in an eighteenth‐century maxim and was institutionalized through the example of the Earl of Chatham. Edmund Burke's alternative criterion of decision, derived from public evaluation of a Leader's “image,” is used to expose the dubious, perhaps dangerous, quality of our contemporary dedication to “issue"‐oriented political argument.