History shows that too much Plato brings a rigid dogmatism and an elitist arrogance—which, as Karl Popper pointed out and as the world saw in the age of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, easily slides into totalitarianism.‡ The twentieth-century successors to Aristotle, the voices of enlightened liberal Europe, forgot how to defend themselves and allowed the totalitarians, with their passionate intensity and contempt for debate, to goose-step into power. The catastrophes of the twentieth century arose not because men argued too much but because they gave up arguing at all. Such are the perils of too
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