"One of the greatest errors of the party was that it stopped representing the interests of the people, and represented the interests of small groups," said Mr. Madrazo.
It follows that the greatest errors of government are those by which the government of a society, because of its excessive concern for the society's accidental progress, loses sight of that which constitutes the substance of the society.
Is that the greatest "error of [Obama's] political career"?
Pius IX, in his infamous "Syllabus of Errors," published in 1864, listed a series of mistaken ideas held by the contemporary Church, ending with what he considered the greatest error of them all: "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization".
Mr. Sarkozy said France had fallen into "bad habits" that he meant to correct, and said the two great errors of the last 20 years were the Socialist Party's decisions to cut the retirement age to 60 from 65 and to establish a 35-hour workweek.
In the early decades of this century, Americans have sometimes traced our greatest errors to a failure of imagination: the inability to picture a terrorist, in a cave, who is able to strike; the hubris to ignore extensive State Department predictions of what would come of the invasion of Iraq.
"Like most historical calamities, the British defeat came about not through any single great error of judgment, but rather through a combination of misunderstanding, miscalculation and sheer bad luck," he wrote.
From this perspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the new mechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictly enough to empirical facts.
In regarding nature as completely intelligible, Weyl had abolished the thing-in-itself and so promoted the identity of self and non-self, the great error of the Naturphilosophien.
This view is often associated in medieval philosophy with Plato and his followers, and by the time of Ockham it is regarded, somewhat hyperbolically, as the source or root (radix) of the greatest errors in philosophy.
In all of this, the arguably greatest error in terms of international reality would be Mrs. Merkel's appearing to suppose there is some major strategic differentiation between the two Russian leaders, and to cast Mr. Medvedev as a relatively benevolent force.
