Berlin would have warned us against hubris and intolerance, but also against fatalism. In the battle to come, history is on no one’s side. The outcome of this struggle over who owns the meaning of freedom will come down, as it always does, to the eternal question that decides history’s shape: who is prepared to fight hardest for what they believe.
We must be unafraid to confront the dark side of progress now, but without losing faith in the human campaign to make life better. This is the conviction that we need to save our planet and ourselves.
When the authority of science and the authority of democracy conflict and the result is a stand-off, a legitimacy vacuum can ensue, with ordinary citizens distrusting government and scientific advisers in equal measure.
The current populist challenges in western liberal democracies should not be seen as evidence of their decline, but as a constituent part. The history of democracy shows us that such challenges enable democracy’s growth and evolution.
Upholding open society means accepting the “strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.” An open society is very demanding. It asks us to respect the dignity of others, especially of those with whom we may disagree and to make choices for ourselves and our community.
I certainly expected to walk away. Yet it soon became obvious that my work was not done, that closure is the last thing one should expect a completed biography to deliver. Once one role is completed, a new role emerges: defender and guardian of the flame. Here loyalty and truth come into conflict once again.
Politics is not a vulgar means to a goal, it’s a noble life unto itself, and unless you love it, you can’t do it well. I didn’t get there, but I hope you will.
As long as money is moralized as speech, and not understood as power, there is little chance that the republic can put money in its proper place. Without a politics—of redistributive taxation, public goods investment for growth, and rules controlling money in politics—any critique of what money has done to American life is just moralizing.
