shrewdness

From shrewd +‎ -ness.

shrewdness (countable and uncountable, plural shrewdnesses)

1. The quality of being shrewd.
   • 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Interview”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 245:

     A man with less worldly shrewdness would never have seen how things really stood; a man with less pliability could never have adapted himself to them. It must always be remembered, that his whole administration was one long struggle: he had to maintain his master on the throne, and himself in the ministry; and this was done by sheer force of talent.

   • 1968, Robert Conquest, “The Purge Begins”, in The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties‎^[1], Macmillan Company, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 75:

     At the centre of Stalin’s superiority over his competitors was certainly his intense will, just as Napoleon ranked what he called ‘moral fortitude’ higher in a general than genius or experience. When Milovan Djilas said to Stalin during the Yugoslav-Soviet discussions in Moscow during the war that the Serbian politician Gavrilović was ‘a shrewd man’, Stalin commented, as though to himself: ‘Yes, there are politicians who think shrewdness is the main thing in politics. . . .’⁴⁴ His was a will-power taken to a logical extreme. There is something non-human about his almost total lack of normal restraints upon it.

2. An invented collective name for a group of apes.