QUOTE : Politics as the art of managing vice is a dangerous game to play, and many have ruined their societies in trying to play it. In Augustine’s biblical view, only God can manage the subtleties of the process, and the theological term for God’s management of the world is providence. By contrast, all would-be human providences will fail in the end, whether Hobbes’s false providence of the “Leviathan” of the political state or Adam Smith’s false providence of “the invisible hand” of the commercial market. Today’s liberal democracy, with its culture of transgression, its drive to liberate anything and everything done by and between consenting adults, and its mania for management by metrics, appears bent on adding to history’s examples of societies that failed to manage vice and the crooked timber of our humanity.