Amor Mundi

More on Saving the Open Society

Roger Berkowitz

03-02-2025

Last week I wrote about how we are witnessing a cyclic reaction against a historical period of a liberal and open society, which is represented by a post-World War II consensus that sought to suppress collective, national, and religious power. I argued that the revolutionary movement against our “open society” requires a response. We need to understand the attraction to a closed society that is suddenly culturally ascendent and also to recommit ourselves to a more vibrant and vigorous open society, one that could provide some of the meaning and purpose traditionally offered by closed societies.

What makes Hannah Arendt’s work so powerful and unique is that she at once understood the weakness of modern-liberalism along with the appeal of traditional closed societies, but also that she palpably understood how the totalitarian break-in-tradition made going back to closed societies impossible and also dangerous. Arendt’s political thought is a sustained effort to live in and to love our broken reality, a world without bannisters, but one in which we also must work collectively to build a meaningful common sense amidst the ruins of the tradition. One way to build a more meaningful and virtuous version of an open society is to embrace a more engaged and virtuous politics, one in which the traditional religious or moral transcendence is replaced by what Arendt calls a political transcendence—the experience that through political engagement in building a common world for the benefit of all we move beyond our narrow self-interests and cultivate a public interest.

In the effort to save liberalism it will not suffice to rant about the dangers of authoritarianism or tyranny or fascism. I say this not because there is no danger from authoritarianism, but because it is not authoritarian or fascist impulses driving our present moment. If we want to understand and thus resist what is happening, we have to, as Arendt counseled, face up to the reality of what is happening. In her famous formulation from the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Comprehension, however does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt.” We need to confront the new. “Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality–whatever it may be or might have been.”

To comprehend the powerful popular and democratic revolutionary rejection of liberal society that is sweeping the world, we need to look clearly at the limits and failures of liberalism. To that end, Matthew Rose has an essay out that offers an account of the difficulty of building a lasting and meaningful liberal and open society. Rose approaches his analysis of the weakness of the open society through a reading of a 1941 speech given by Leo Strauss, who had been a student with Arendt in Germany before the war. Strauss in his lectures asked, “whether liberal societies could endure despite their weaknesses.” He sought to defend the open society, but did so by arguing that the open society of liberalism would need to be able to incorporate certain virtues typically associated with strong and closed societies. Specifically, Strauss argued that even an open society needs to cultivate the “martial virtues of courage, heroism, and loyalty,” that allow people to prove themselves. His point is that to live a meaningful human life we need more than simply to stay alive, work, and procreate—the goods of a liberal and bourgeois life. As Rose writes:

“Rather, we prove our humanity only by exercising our radical ability to contradict those goods, only by risking our lives for a value greater than mere survival. To live as a human being is to fight to the death for something higher than life. Within this moral world—a world so fundamentally hostile to liberal modernity—man is not made for comfort and security. He is tempted by them. The man who wishes truly to live must flirt with death.”

Strauss’ 1941 lecture was titled “German Nihilism.” As did Arendt, Strauss saw the way that nihilism led to what Arendt called a justified disgust at liberal society. That both Strauss and Arendt wanted to save liberalism from itself does not mean that they thought they could ignore its weaknesses. For Strauss, not necessarily for Arendt, the weakness of liberalism was its rejection of the values of a closed society. Rose explains:

"Strauss assumed his American students might have difficulty seeing the possible strengths, to say nothing of the seductive appeal, of a way of life associated with ignorance and bigotry. He therefore tried to show them how liberal and democratic ideals might appear from a perspective that denies their moral legitimacy—not out of resentment or bad faith, but out of loyalty to a higher order of values. The rights of man, the relief of the human estate, the happiness of the greatest possible number—for advocates of the open society, these are ideals that have inspired social progress. They are part of a shift in modern consciousness, through which we have recognized our power to change the present, rather than simply accept the authority of the past. But to defenders of the closed society, Strauss argued, the moral prestige of these slogans evinces a different kind of shift. It is a sign that humanity has been debased rather than ennobled.

To draw his listeners into anti-liberal ways of thinking, Strauss sketched the development of modern political thought from the perspective of the closed society. This interpretation casts the arc of modernity in a disturbing light, depicting as decline what Enlightenment thinkers hailed as advance. It sees modernity as the story of how and why Western societies chose to lower their moral ideals, exchanging the demanding codes of antiquity and biblical religion for the comfortable norms of commercial society, legal proceduralism, and bourgeois life. Heroic ideals, attainable only by the exceptional few, were defined down for the ordinary many; ideals that promoted spiritual or intellectual excellence were balanced by those promoting health and prosperity; ideals that imposed self-denial were replaced by those that indulged self-expression.

As Strauss’s reading of modernity suggests, the closed society is defined by what it affirms no less than by what it rejects. He emphasized that its conflict with the open society is ultimately over the most fundamental question: Which way of life is best for man? For defenders of the closed society, human life should be ordered to a political end whose achievement requires the highest and rarest human qualities. So demanding is its vision of moral excellence, so uncommon are the virtues it requires, and yet so necessary is it to the sustaining of human life, that its fulfillment involves the greatest personal risk. As Strauss described it:

Moral life . . . means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness . . . are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment. . . . Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human.

Duty, sacrifice, danger, struggle—here we enter the charged atmosphere of a moral world that Strauss feared his students, and not only his students, failed to understand. It saw the best human life as one that dares to risk all for the sake of heroic possibilities. It saw the desire to pledge oneself to a great cause and to prostrate oneself before great authorities as essential to human virtue. In later writings, Strauss would examine a tension between the life of philosophy and the life of faith, a tension that he believed was foundational to Western civilization. But the conflict between the open and closed societies is not a conflict between reason and revelation. It is a conflict over the necessity of life-and-death struggles for human excellence. If the open society is constituted by free argument and equal recognition, the closed society is formed by loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and honor. It celebrates the virtues that it believes make political order possible: the willingness to forgo material comforts, to close ranks against outsiders and oppose enemies, and, above all, to fight to the death with no thought for profit or pleasure. Though these virtues animate other spheres of life, they are, in their deepest origin and highest expression, martial virtues."

That Strauss saw value in the moral vigor of martial and tribal values does not mean he wanted to trade an open society for a closed society. He was, as Rose sees, “alarmed by the ease with which theoretical attacks on liberalism could turn into excuses for political evil.” Instead, he argued that to preserve liberalism we would need to develop a pedagogy and culture that incorporate elements of the closed society with the open society. Rose writes:

"But as Strauss looked to the war raging in Europe and imagined a future that learned from its mistakes, he proposed a strikingly different form of education. He argued that good teachers should not seek to dispel the allure of the closed society; instead, they should carefully draw students directly inside of it. This pedagogy would enable students to experience the power of the closed society’s moral demands, to sense the appeal of its political life, and to feel challenged by its vision of human excellence."

Strauss didn’t wish to turn his students into sophisticated enemies of liberalism. His goal was to turn them into virtuous defenders of democracy. But to become true patrons of the open society, they needed qualities of character that could be developed only through a proper appreciation of traditional society. The open society was right to order its common life through the exercise of reason and the arts of civility. But the closed society was also right about some important things. It acknowledged our need to be loyal to a particular people, to inherit a cultural tradition, to admire inequalities of achievement, to reverence the authority of the past, and to experience self-transcendence through self-sacrifice. It acknowledged as well the importance of a leadership class whose decisions expose them to special risk rather than shielding them from it. As Strauss observed, these are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded. A society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them."