OK, so I’ve posited a 2 x 2 matrix to define the kind of political divisions I’m trying to talk about.

Let start with the more complicated axis and see if I can knock that out before the pizza we’re making is ready (Friday is always Pizza and Movie night at Casa de Armed Liberal).

I’ll use three words to try and describe one end of the axis:

– Open
– Unfinished
– Fine-grained

On the other, we have

– Closed
– Complete
– Large-scale

Let me give some concrete examples – literally.

Why is Paris a more interesting city than Irvine? Why is it that when we see pictures of the Champs or of Rue l’Odeon we’re more interested than when we see pictures of Fashion Island Way?

In another example, what is the difference between the styles of fighting of the U.S. Army that invaded Iraq with minimal losses and the Soviet Army that took incredible losses invading Grozny?

One succeeds (on specific terms) and one doesn’t.

Because one is ‘unfinished’, it is fine-grained, and deliberately open in design and planning, and the other is the result of a massive single vision. On one hand you have the coherent but slightly different visions and plans created and executed by people close to the scene, and on the other the broad-brush implementation of the huge plans made by distant visionaries.

One is, in a word that ought to resonate to this audience, open-source.

The other isn’t.

Visionaries don’t usually have open-source dreams. Their dreams are entire, whole, of a cloth. And like Lenin, they are often willing to build mountains of corpses to construct them.

Other people are the material of these dreams, not participants in them.

I was an immense fan of the architect Le Corbusier until I actually walked through one of his buildings, a convent in France. And I thought it was horrible. Because it was ‘finished’.

There are two great books: “How Buildings Learn”, by Stewart Brand, and “Building the Unfinished” by Lars Lerup. Both of them talk about how neighborhoods and buildings are changed by those who live in them and use them, and how good neighborhoods…ones that we find attractive and liveable…are those that have been adapted by those who use them.

So what I’m trying to talk about is an axis between a Romantic ideal…a single grand vision, an orgasmic leap from self to world via will…and a pragmatic, Classical ideal which talks about complex, evolving systems.

Berlin talked about “the Hedgehog and the Fox”…the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one great thing. He was talking about intellectual history, not political history. But we can talk about political systems in the same way…