Is mankind governed by a vast, hidden system of natural imperatives? Are the natural imperatives gradually leading the world out of the darkness of ignorance and oppression and into the golden light of freedom, individual dignity, and prosperity? Is there a single destiny for mankind, and is progress its inner meaning? And is there something to be said on behalf of the many extravagant 19th-century thinkers who responded to those questions with a series of grandly elaborated answers that added up to "yes"?

It goes without saying that, in our present chastened era, most people are bound to think back on some main experiences of recent generations, and to roll their eyes in disbelief at those questions. Perhaps the most influential and thorough of the English-language arguments against the 19th-century notion of mankind having any kind of single destiny has been Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies--a withering attack, in two volumes, no less, on the philosophers of destiny and universal progress from Plato to Georg Friedrich Hegel. And the single most dramatic and convincing word anywhere in those two volumes, the bleakest word of all, was surely the simple date "1943," posted at the end of Popper's preface, marking the moment when he finished his manuscript and put down his pen. For in 1943 the world was at war, and on one side were Fascists and Nazis who drew on racist and nationalist versions of the Hegelian argument for a universal destiny of mankind; and on the other side, allied with the liberal democracies, were the Soviet Union and communists around the world, who drew on a left-wing version of the same Hegelian argument. It was obvious that nothing threatens freedom more surely than people who believe that freedom is destiny.

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