Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Films

V for Vendetta

Floris van den Berg watches The Open Society and its Enemies, the movie.

“Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human.”

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies.

Is the liberal democratic welfare state the end of history, as was famously claimed by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History? Are war and suppression of civil rights something of the past, or at least something far away abroad? Will our children and their children continue to live their lives in peace, freedom and comfort?

Having been born in the Netherlands in 1973, for me war is something either from the past or something far away. But having studied some history, including Jonathan Glover’s depressing Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999), and reading the daily news, I am not so optimistic anymore. In the post-WW2 West, especially since the end of the Cold War in 1989, we have reached a relative utopia, enjoying comfort, welfare and the freedom of the individual.

…