For in the post-Cold War world, where there are many competing belief systems, not just two, skepticism about the finality of any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem to some people an important value again. And so has the political theory this skepticism helps to underwrite: the theory that democracy is the value that validates all other values. Democratic participation isn't the means to an end, in this way of thinking; is is the end. The purpose of the experiment is to keep the experiment going...Whether this nineteenth-century way of thinking really does have twenty-first century uses is not yet clear. ...how almost unimaginably strange they and their world were...The relevance and the strangeness are forever bound together in their thought.

The last several posts from the two concluding pages of The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand (2001).