 Like the study of history, political judgement involves reaching an understanding of the unique set of characteristics that constitute a particular individual, atmosphere, state of affairs or event (ibid., 56). This requires a capacity for integrating ‘a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicoloured, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data’, a ‘direct, almost sensuous contact with the relevant data’, and ‘an acute sense of what fits with what, what springs from what, what leads to what; […] what the result is likely to be in a concrete situation of the interplay of human beings and impersonal forces’ (ibid., 57–8). Such a sense is qualitative rather than quantitative, specific rather than general, for all that it may be built on past experience.