Nietzsche's great value was not his ideals but his candor. To rely on an anachronism, we might say he was endearingly politically incorrect. This age of cant and preening priggishness could prosper by a strong dose of straight talk, and Dannhauser recommended Nietzsche as potent medicine. But the patient could well choke on such a bitter pill. Modern democracy, several panelists agreed, often functions as a program or method of attempting to assimilate irreconcilables. All the cant and catch phrases
represent a real effort to paper over the failure to accomplish the impossible. For example, many modern democrats imagine that we can simultaneously have prefect personal autonomy -- Prof. Patrick Deneen spoke of an earlier conference at Princeton dedicated to the defense of "voluntary amputation" of "oppressive limbs" -- and thriving community.

OF COURSE, such a social condition is impossible. If men are perfectly autonomous, they must be empowered to obliterate community by means of their unconstrained choices. If real community is to exist, it must hold real power, whether legal, moral, or merely conventional, to command the assent of its members. The society of perfect individual autonomy is the ideal of the Open Society, in which all questions are open questions. But this is a dreary contradiction. What it really means is that all questions are open questions, except the question of whether all questions are open.

No society can suffer its very legitimacy to be questioned brazenly and indefinitely, and, in this basic sense, all societies are closed. Even the classical liberal Thomas Babington Macaulay took a sarcastic shot at Socrates, philosophy's hero of the open society: "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."