Under modern conditions, any half-decent modus vivendi will look more like liberalism than Gray supposes. The same competitive economy that liberates individuals to choose their own desired ends also provides them with socially undesirable wants and fosters habits potentially at odds with the demands of liberal democracy. Given Knight's desire both to defend human liberty and his concession that liberty is likely to be abused, his version of liberalism must of necessity be anticonsequentialist. The crisis of modern reason culminates in Nietzsche's proclamation of nihilism. Peter Berkowitz suggests, however, that Nietzsche is a contradictory thinker who fails in his attempt to combine ancient rationalism with modern voluntarism.
Postmodernism thus rests upon a defective foundation.
Berkowitz's critique of postmodernism is telling, but he does not recognize dangerous millenarian elements in Nietzsche's thought. Moreover, the concept of ancient reason he holds up as an alternative is under-developed and undifferentiated. Wittgenstein vs. Rorty Reason, objectivity, and human nature are now suspect ideas. Among postmodern thinkers, Richard Rorty has advanced an especially forceful critique of these notions. The responses to Hayek's case against social justice, however, fail to draw any blood, for they do not seriously deal with Hayek's central claim that the very notion of social justice is incoherent.