Goodbye to a Virulently Ideological Century

Each day brings fresh evidence that we are leaving the 20th century behind. One of that century's most pervasive conceits was that we could manage our world as if it were a household or some other human institution subject to comprehensive authority and rules imposed by us. We spent most of the century arguing over different management schemes, while a rearguard of classical liberals and libertarians gradually lost the fight for a more open-ended perspective: one less reliant on prophylactic regulation and less complacent about guaranteed outcomes.