Despite its obsession with “openness,” the world of the post-war open society has in truth always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. It is a world in which human nature, indeed our very humanity, is viewed with great suspicion, as something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed, and contained – or, even better, remolded into a reliable cog to fit safely into a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of a world of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism, and passivity has always been one “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe,” as Ernst Jünger once put it.