Originally published in Rethinking Open Society (CEU Press)
“We are becoming more and more painfully aware of the gross imperfections in our life, of personal as well as of institutional imperfection; of avoidable suffering, of waste and of unnecessary ugliness; and at the same time of the fact that it is not impossible for us to do something about all this, but that such improvements would be just as hard to achieve as they are important. This awareness increases the strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.”
Karl Popper[1]
The values of an open society—free minds, free politics, and free institutions—have been constitutive of Western civilization. Since the Greeks, these values have been under attack from authoritarian and totalitarian competitors. Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies was published in 1945 as a defense of these values against the twin totalitarian enemies of Nazism and Stalinism, the one heading towards ignominious defeat, the other rising in the ascendant. What was wise about Popper’s analysis, now that we look back on it eighty years later, was his awareness that the open society ideal cannot exist without its enemies. An open society depends for its very definition on the presence of a persuasive counterexample. Even in our own times, the disgrace of Nazism and Stalinism has done nothing to dim the lure of closed society to those who live within open ones. Instead, closed society has shed its totalitarian form and assumed new authoritarian guises. Closed societies are tempting because open societies are difficult to live in and their ideals are hard to practice. Upholding open society means accepting the “strain of personal responsibility, of carrying the cross of being human.” Popper’s language here may be overheated, but the thought is clear enough. An open society is very demanding. It asks us to respect the dignity of others, especially of those with whom we may disagree and to make choices for ourselves and our community. It offers us no readily applicable solutions, no straightforward recipe for a better world, but demands that we make reasoned choices, often in perplexing, uncertain, and frightening times. Moreover, open societies frequently fail their citizens. Freedom is easy to abuse. Oligopolies and monopolies distort markets; elites confiscate political power and use it to entrench their privileges; demagogues secure votes through distortion of the truth or the cultivation of hatred. In these and other ways, the freedoms of open society can be betrayed from within. Small wonder, then, that a closed society in which the burden of freedom is taken off the shoulders of citizens by charismatic leaders at the head of single party states, remains a seductive temptation, even for democratic peoples.
Defending open society has been vital to the mission of Central European University (CEU) since it was established in 1991. The institution’s founder, George Soros, had been a student of Popper’s at the London School of Economics, and CEU was created to further these ideals in former communist societies undergoing the arduous and uncertain transition to democracy and a market economy. CEU’s task was to provide advanced education in the social sciences and humanities for societies whose universities had been shackled by the closed society thinking of official Marxism. Since then, and under a variety of political regimes, it has consolidated its reputation as a serious research university. This has not prevented it from coming under attack, most recently by the current Hungarian government. The core of the attack is the claim that the university is a political institution masquerading as a university. The claim is false, as the accrediting agencies who inspect our teaching or review our research have attested, but the attacks are inevitable, in a sense, since the university’s mission—to promote the values of a free society—is bound to create suspicion and criticism when governments encroach upon those values. CEU, like any university worthy of the name, can never afford to allow its mission to politicize its teaching or research. It must stand for values without allowing itself to become a prisoner of politics or ideology.
In CEU’s case, the duty to promote the open society ideal comes with an obligation to subject the ideal itself to constant re-interpretation and critique. We need to ask difficult questions: whether the ideal, as articulated in 1945, remains relevant in a world changed beyond recognition, why the ideal is under attack, and why single party regimes, promising the certainties and reassurances of the closed society, are now so much in the ascendant, including in the country, Hungary, that has been our home for 27 years. So in 2017 and 2018, CEU invited scholars and thinkers from around the world to join us for a sustained series of lectures and debates under the title Rethinking Open Society, the results of which are presented in this volume.
To begin, I would like to raise three basic questions. The first is: Who were open society’s old enemies, when the idea first took shape in 1945 in Karl Popper’s work? The second is: Who are the new enemies of open society, the ones we confront today? And then, the most difficult question of all: Has the open society ideal outlived its usefulness? I cover the first two questions in this Introduction; the third question is one we answer collectively in this volume.
The Open Society and its Old Enemies
Karl Popper came from a liberal assimilated Jewish family in Vienna and did pioneering work in the philosophy of science before fleeing Austrian Fascism in the mid-1930s.[2] Open society thus is an idea whose deepest intellectual roots are in Central and Eastern Europe. The book Open Society and its Enemies, published in Britain in 1945, represents Popper’s “war work,” his contribution to the anti-totalitarian struggle. As such, it belongs in a lineage that includes works as various as Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, J. L. Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. All of them sought to trace the roots of the totalitarian temptation into the recesses of human psychology and the origins of the European intellectual tradition, in Popper’s case, right back to Plato. This is the family lineage that Jan-Werner Müller has called “Cold War liberalism.”[3]
These figures, writing between 1945 and 1950, identified the dangers of the totalitarian vision embraced by Hitler and Stalin and defended an anti- utopian politics based on a gradualist defense of freedom. Popper speaks for all of them when he writes: “How can we organize political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”[4] Hannah Arendt, another Jewish refugee from Nazi tyranny, also belonged to this “war work” generation. Her The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1948, echoed Popper in his critique of determinist theories of history, chiefly Marxism, as a legitimation of a coercive politics. As she writes: “Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history.”[5] Marx had said that Marxism is the key to history and knows itself to be such. Open society thinking was an active rebellion against the coercive arrogance that this idea brought to politics.
A third Jewish refugee from totalitarianism, Isaiah Berlin, born in Riga, came to Oxford in the 1930s and played a key role in developing the third distinctive feature of open society, namely, its commitment to liberty. By freedom, Isaiah Berlin meant freedom from interference above all, freedom from enslavement to ends not freely chosen by oneself. Open society’s conception of freedom is negative, the liberty of human beings to choose their own ends, as they see fit, as opposed to a positive vision of “freedom to,” in which a society shapes collective ends and individuals achieve freedom by serving those ends. Open society is anchored in a passionate belief that each of us must be sovereign in the choices we make in our own lives. This moral individualism was the core idea of open society.
It is important to notice that each of these thinkers prioritized liberty over equality. The totalitarian temptation sought to level, to equalize, and to forge individuals in the same mould. For open society thinkers, this was a cardinal reason why, when choices had to be made, priority had to be given to individual freedom over equality. If today we are looking for a critique of the tendency of capitalist societies to generate inequalities that threaten the freedom and equality of voice necessary to make a liberal democracy flourish, we will look in vain through the works of the founding generation of open society thinkers. They had other problems in mind.
These thinkers had their differences, but they shared the same opponents: the totalitarian tyrants, their apologists, and those on the European and American left who sought to salvage a revolutionary alternative to open society from the totalitarian temptation. Popper, Berlin, and Arendt were in critical, sometimes embattled dialogue with western apologists of communist totalitarianism like Jean Paul Sartre and western Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, and Christopher Hill in Britain—brilliant academic radicals who, having rejected totalitarianism, remained attracted to the ideal of a revolutionary alternative to the open society.
In addition to enemies on the left, there were enemies on the right: conservatives—Michael Oakeshott in Britain comes to mind—who were repelled by what they took to be the moral individualism of capitalist society and who feared that capitalist modernity would destroy valued traditions and collective ideals. Popper conceded more to these conservative misgivings about modernity than one might assume. He gave much thought to what he called “the strain of civilisation.” Open society thinkers were anti-utopian in the sense that they did not want to persuade anyone that liberal democratic freedom was paradise. They all wanted to say that it was disorienting to live in societies where we have the responsibility of personal freedom and political choice, and where we live in a hurricane of what Josef Schumpeter called “the creative destruction” of the capitalist order.[6]
Open society’s final enemy was what both Popper and Berlin called “historicism,” the attempt to think that history could provide a reliable scientific guide to political action. Their attack on historicism had a metaphysical implication that should be emphasized. Living with “the strain of civilization” meant being reconciled to uncertainty, to accept the future as the open horizon line of a free society. Open society thinking has a tacit metaphysics, the idea that to live in liberal freedom is to live in a world in which we accept—to quote Alexander Herzen’s wonderful remark—that “history has no libretto.” We have to be reconciled to the limits of our knowledge and our predictive judgments. It is better to live in ignorance, Berlin and Popper believed, than in tyrannous certainty.
These refugees from Nazi and Soviet tyranny did not have very much to say about the institutional order of an open society. They simply took it off the shelf. As they arrived in Britain and the United States, they adopted the liberal democratic constitutionalism of their countries of refuge as their tacit institutional framework. So, if contemporary liberal democratic constitutionalism is in crisis today, we will look in vain in the works of Popper, Berlin, or Arendt for a remedy or even a critique. To repeat Jan-Werner Müller’s formulation, these founding thinkers of open society are in essence Cold War liberals. They took for granted an international order divided between a liberal capitalist West led by the benign hegemony of the United States and a totalitarian East dominated by Moscow and Beijing. If, therefore, we turn to these original thinkers for guidance in a world where U.S. hegemony is on the wane, North Atlantic unity is fragmenting and the closed societies of the East have opened up to the global capitalist order while retaining single party domination, we will look in vain. They were working with another world in mind.
If next, we consider the economic content of open society, the vision most of them took for granted was Keynesian demand management and the welfare state economics of the late 1940s and 1950s. It is true that one of Popper’s closest friends at the London School of Economics, Friedrich von Hayek, launched a devastating critique of the epistemological limitations of central government planning in a free economy in 1944.[7] But by and large, Popper himself, as well as Berlin and Arendt, took for granted a redistributive and welfarist vision of the state’s role in regulating a capitalist economy, to the degree that they thought about economic questions at all. At the same time, their change model was cautious: what Popper calls “piecemeal social engineering,” as opposed to what Stalin had called the engineering of human souls.
Open society in its origins, therefore, was not neoliberal; it was its opposite.
One critical aspect of open society thinking was the connection that Popper drew between the epistemology of a free society and its morality of tolerance. As a philosopher and a historian of science, Popper believed that the key practice that keeps a society free is the scientific method, the constant falsification of theory through systematic reality testing.[8] His attack on totalizing political ideologies derived from this epistemological and also moral conviction that all theory is conditional, provisional, and must give way when falsified by the facts. Few elements of his thinking remain more relevant to a university’s mission than this.
From that epistemology Popper developed an ethic of tolerance. If all theory was conditional upon falsification, no one was in sole or exclusive possession of the truth. If we know we can be wrong, it pays to listen to others, to tolerate, even welcome views that diverge from whatever theory or political or moral values we happen to hold. Since our relationship to facts is or ought to be an individual relationship, dependent upon our free minds alone, we have an obligation to get reality, our conception of it, right for us.
Constitutional liberalism entrenches this epistemology within its very institutions. Power checks power, so no single source can impose an ideology from the top or even sometimes a clear political direction. Parliamentary democracy forces executive authority to justify its measures before the adversarial scrutiny of a parliament. Judges bring the critical epistemology of law to the review of administrative and legal decisions. A free media referees the battle over public choice with a complex epistemology of scrutiny, driven by skepticism, scandal mongering, and profit seeking. Universities play their role in subjecting public claims to peer-reviewed research. These institutions—courts, parliaments, media, universities—together, and without concertation or top-down direction, create the epistemological frame in which a free society struggles its way towards the knowledge it needs, or the closure on debate it must accept, in order to chart its collective course into the future. This is how an open society actually operates, and it is a messy, confusing, and often unsatisfying process that produces recurrent nostalgia for rule by experts or charismatic leaders or both.
Open society as a doctrine took on the contours but also the limitations of Cold War liberalism. It shared liberalism’s ascendancy between the end of World War II and the economic crisis of the 1970s. It also shared the progress of what should be called the liberal revolution: the decolonization and dismantling of European empires, the triumph of the national independence movements, the victory of the U.S. civil rights revolution, the emergence of feminism and the gay rights movements. We can call this a liberal revolution because it was rights-driven and its objective was freedom, both for nations and for individuals. An open society thus became a society in which everyone—regardless of race, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation—could enjoy the benefits of freedom.
By the early 1970s, however, with the onset of a global economic crisis, the rising cost of the postwar welfare state and a growing backlash from white majority voters against the rights of minorities, a counter-revolution swept Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. From that moment on, the cause of open society began to be associated, ever more closely, with neo-liberalism, with de-regulation, lower taxes, and the scaling back of the liberal state. An open society champion like Hayek influenced Mrs. Thatcher, enabling her to equate the struggle to dismantle a relatively benign welfare state with the battle against socialist and communist tyranny. Not all open society thinkers did align themselves with the conservative, anti-liberal politics of the 1970s and 1980s, but some did, and if open society rhetoric suddenly began to acquire new opponents on the left, it was because of its association with the neo-liberal turn.
While open society increasingly aligned with anti-communist neo-liberalism in Western Europe, it also forged a crucial association with the anti-totalitarian civil society movements of Eastern Europe. Dissidents in Warsaw and Gdansk, in Prague and Budapest launched a challenge to their communist regimes, using the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, to create human rights NGOs at home. They enlisted support overseas from academics, journalists, and philanthropists, and one of these, George Soros, used the concept of open society, which he had learned from his mentor at the London School of Economics, to shape his philanthropic support for the dissidents. In the process, open society advocates developed a change model, in which money and expertise from the outside was to be channeled to inside civil society organizations whose campaigns slowly drained moral legitimacy from communist regimes. This change model, implied in Václav Havel’s famous phrase “the power of the powerless,”[9] and then developed by Solidarność and Charter 77, ushered in European civil society’s finest hour: the largely peaceful transitions that occurred between 1988 and 1990.
The Open Society and its New Enemies
It was then, at open society’s apparent moment of triumph, that the trouble started. Civil society liberals, who swept all before them in 1989 and 1990, failed to transform loose civil society associations into political parties and trade unions robust enough to survive electoral competition with nationalists, ex-communists, and conservatives in the post-transition era. Václav Havel, for example, refused to create his own political party, trying to remain above the fray as President. Political power began to flow to illiberal challengers. In Hungary in 2002, Viktor Orbán managed to create a major civic movement on the right, while the left failed to institutionalize their own support, as Béla Greskovits explains in his chapter in this volume. The failure of liberals to develop political instruments of power prepared the ground for other political forces with more effective organizations and a shrewder sense of the fears and anxieties unleashed when the certainties of the communist order were swept away. The chaotic character of the sell-off of state property, the privatizations that benefited a new oligarchy while leaving others’ lives unchanged, did much to erode the luster of the open society ideal. It seemed to have led not to freedom, but to a nasty new world of inequality.
For a time in the 1990s, the chaotic transition in Eastern Europe was disciplined and incentivized by the European Union accession process. These incentives were all directed towards creating the institutional framework of open society, the separation of powers, free media, a free civil society, the constitutional guarantees of rights, and minority protection. As long as the incentives of the accession process were operating, the countries seeking entry to the European Union followed the path towards open society. Once accession was complete, once they were inside the club, the European Union gradually lost its capacity to entrench open society institutions in enlargement countries. In its place, a new political form, combining single party domination of the political system, media controls, and rent-seeking corruption began to displace open society as the political goal of the ruling elites.
This coincided with the gradual withdrawal of the United States from European integration processes. The Dayton Accord of 1995 was the last moment in which the United States made a concerted political and military commitment to peace and stability in Europe. Since then, both Western European and American incentives towards open society have weakened. When the transitions began to stall in the economic crisis of 2008, new insecurities created a fertile ground that illiberal regimes exploited to consolidate power and move, wherever possible, to permanent single party rule. At the same time, these regimes turned out to be adept at mobilizing their populations against key open society values like multicultural tolerance and openness to migration. After the uncontrolled migration surge of 2015, open society advocates rapidly lost the battle for Eastern European hearts and minds.
Further to the East, Russia lived through the Eastern European experience of transition, but in a still more humiliating and chaotic form. For most Russians, the transition from closed to open society took the form of imperial collapse, economic disintegration, and the weakening of public order and welfare supports. It is no surprise that an alternative to open society began to emerge after a decade of chaotic opening to the global economy. A figure like Vladimir Putin, trained by the one Soviet institution that still worked, the security services, took control of the state apparatus, and used oil revenues to restore state benefits and to rebuild the administrative capacity of the coercive state. He then made a deal with the oligarchs who had benefitted from the privatization of the 1990s. He gave them the stability they needed to make their fortunes, in return for complete political obedience. On this basis, a new form of capitalist autocracy began to take shape in Russia.
Still further to the East, the Chinese went through a similar encounter with openness. Beginning in the mid 1960s, they experienced the chaos and disorder of the cultural revolution. They came out of it, concluding that they must open to the global economy or be left behind. Having opened, the party elite then began to grasp the looming danger in open society’s freedoms. Free markets and free ideas would lead to free politics, and once they did, the monopoly of single party rule would come under challenge. The Chinese ruling elite made a clear strategic choice to consolidate single party rule at the expense of open society.
In Western democracies, open society defenders in power often failed the test of continuous crisis ushered in after 9/11. The terrorist attacks sapped faith in the protecting state and undermined confidence in open borders and open institutions. The economic crisis of 2008 weakened confidence in the economic sovereignty of states and their capacity to fairly distribute the benefits of prosperity. These intersecting pressures—terrorism, rising inequality, and job insecurity—created a political opening for populist majoritarianism. Populist anger has brought about British exit from Europe and the election of an American President committed to a radical nationalist agenda. All in all, these are open society’s new enemies: the single party autocracies of Russia and China, the illiberal democracies of Eastern Europe, and the democratic populists in Western Europe and North America.
We are living in what is best described as a counter-revolutionary moment, a concerted attempt to undo the international political order and the open international economy created after 1945. We are moving away from multilateral cooperation and open international markets towards closed borders, the return of the sovereign state, and transactional power politics. This counter-revolution is driven by the polarization of domestic politics, with a politics of enemies supplanting a politics of compromise. The counter-revolution is also targeting the liberal revolution and the gains made by minorities. It remains to be seen how much of the liberal revolution will survive, but it is clear that open society’s brief moment of dominance after 1989 has now ended.
Has Open Society Outlived its Usefulness?
As we take stock of open society’s new enemies and their political ascendancy, we need to distinguish them from the totalitarian enemies faced by Cold War liberals. We cannot understand these new regimes according to an open-closed logic. Soviet Russia and Mao’s China were closed societies in an ideological sense, committed to a systemic alternative to capitalism—the socialist mode of production—which they tried to export to developing countries in the global south. Today’s Russia and China have no alternative economic model to export. They price their goods on the open international market; Chinese companies compete with capitalist multinationals for market share around the world. Capital import and export are fundamental to their economies. Using Albert Hirschman’s terminology, the new regimes all allow exit and voice and they do not impose loyalty.[10] Their citizens may not enjoy full speech rights, but they have a right to exit, and this right—together with the right to stash their money overseas—acts as a crucial safety valve stabilizing these regimes against internal discontent. Both the Russian and Chinese regimes allow limited voice rights precisely so that these regimes can listen in, and in doing so, hear rumblings of discontent in time. Finally, unlike Stalin and Mao, neither the Russian nor Chinese regimes demand the intense, all-encompassing regime loyalty of the past. Instead, they channel loyalty to the nation and seek to legitimize their regimes as authentic expressions of nationalist sentiment.
Likewise, if we look at the “illiberal democracies” in Eastern Europe, they are not closed societies in the classic Popperian sense. They are members of NATO, the European Union, the World Trade Organization; they are dependent on free migration of their populations to Western Europe, on inward investment, and on the ability to place their own capital outside. Media pluralism in Eastern Europe is reduced, but opposition voices can still be heard and these new regimes do not need to resort to police terror or overt intimidation. They do not demand public expressions of loyalty to the regime itself, seeking to channel loyalty instead to the nation, and they legitimize themselves through free, if highly manipulated elections. So they are something new under the sun: single party states that allow exit, voice, and canalize loyalty, while maintaining democratic legitimacy. Popper’s schema of open and closed societies works neither for the capitalist autocracies, nor for the illiberal democracies. North Korea remains the only society on earth that can still be called closed in a Popperian sense, and even this society may be making a complex opening towards the external world.
The new enemies of open society are integrated into the global economy in ways that render them both more stable, but also more susceptible to external economic pressures. This is the broad context of change that has overtaken the open society paradigm since its first enunciation in 1945. Small wonder that the paradigm is embattled as never before. Open society’s Cold War supports—growing liberal democracies with redistributive capacity, American power as defender of open society, and existential confidence that free markets could benefit us all—have all fallen away.
Now, the paradigm faces unprecedented criticism. Let me identify three separate strands of attack. First of all, opponents of open society argue that its change model is antidemocratic. External funding for civil society, for example by Western foundations, amounts to an illicit intervention into the domestic political processes of a society. This argument is frequently made, not just in Hungary, the Czech Republic, or Poland, but also in India. The second criticism is that open society is simply neo-liberalism dressed up and prettified, and as such is a violation of the economic sovereignty of nation states. According to this criticism from the left, open society rhetoric moralizes globalization red in tooth and claw and has nothing to say about the inequalities that open international economies inevitably generate. The third criticism is that open society values are a coercive and intolerant form of political correctness. Open society, in other words, has become a closed ideology instead of a pluralistic and self-critically open set of values.
So, is open society antidemocratic? Only if you equate democracy with simple majority rule. If, on the contrary, you take democracy to mean majority rule balanced by the rule of law and minority rights, then the open society change model may not always work but it is eminently democratic. Civil society NGO’s defend vulnerable minorities and enable societies, where constitutionalism is under attack, to hold government to account. Indeed, as János Kis argues in his contribution to this volume, the question should be turned on its head, i.e. not, is open society activism anti-democratic, but is “illiberal democracy,” the term used by Viktor Orbán to describe his political vision, a contradiction in terms?
As for the accusation that open society is imprisoned in an ideology of political correctness, if it is politically correct to defend the achievements of the liberal revolution then we ought to plead guilty. The difficulty here, as Jacques Rupnik explains in this volume, is that in Eastern Europe multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity are still foreign concepts for reasons that have to do with the tragic history of the region: the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and enforced partitions between 1918 and 1945 that destroyed the multi-ethnic tolerance of the old imperial states, leaving weakened, resentful mono-ethnic nation states in their wake. And so, even if you defend those values, you still have a battle here, because you are told that open society multiculturalism may apply in Berlin, London, or New York, but not in Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. As for open society being an apologia for neoliberalism, it is true that some open society advocates aligned themselves with Thatcher and Reagan, but the mainstream defense of open society has always included a vision of a strongly redistributive role for the state.
There are other criticisms of open society, however, that are harder to rebut. Did open society neglect the nation, the deep longing for identity and belonging, the need to live in a country that is sovereign, particularly over its borders? Mark Lilla and Roger Scruton certainly argue so in their contributions. Is there some sense in which open society became the ideology of a liberal cosmopolitan elite who did very well from globalization and who of arguments that suggest so. Did we fail to understand the radically differential impact of globalization and fail to see that openness created losers as well as winners? Dorothee Bohle provides an intriguing account of who won and who lost in the transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Did open society take into account the extent to which it gives voice to some while denying voice to others? Niall Ferguson describes how connections matter in open societies and how not everyone is connected equally. While we were defending the institutions of liberal democracy as the best guarantee of open society, did we think carefully enough about the exclusion reproduced by the institutions themselves? Here Alina Mungiu-Pippidi describes how despite the presence of open society institutions, most transition countries are prone to high levels of corruption and economic and social exclusion.
Going still further, was it not naïve of Popper to believe that the epistemology of a free society could be modelled on the practices of scientific falsification, in which sovereign individuals weigh truth claims against empirical evidence and then make a citizens’ judgment? Is there something missing in open society’s account of how citizens acquire their view of the public realm and winnow the truth of fact from the chaff of lies? In this regard, Erica Benner explains how citizens in open societies are susceptible to demagoguery, and Jan-Werner Müller demonstrates the role of misinformation in the rise of populism. Did open society put too much faith in civil society, in the idea of self-organizing groups holding governments to account, mobilizing electorates, creating political movements, and bringing about peaceful change? We have seen how easy it is for governments to marginalize, discredit, and silence civil society voices. If that is the case, do open society defenders and advocates need to rethink their change model? Here, Béla Greskovits’s piece demonstrates how civil society mobilization can lead to societal closing rather than the opposite.
Despite all these justified criticisms, open society ideals should continue to inspire us, precisely because they are so difficult to live by. To be open to oneself, to hear the inner voices of doubt, to be open to the criticism of friends and enemies alike: these are among the most difficult disciplines of human life, but they are constitutive of the democratic temper, the character we need to have in order to be good citizens. The inner voices of doubt are crucial to good political judgment. To be willing to notice that the truths you take to be self-evident no longer correspond to reality requires openness to oneself, to others, and to doubt. This is a moral attitude to reality and to political life that is of signal importance. When thinking about open society, we should not forget to emphasize the word “society.” Conditions of openness are social. No one can be an open person, unless they live in a society that sustains and supports the condition of openness for all. One further insight of the original open society advocates—Popper, Arendt, Berlin, Hayek, and others—is simply that openness and freedom depend on counter-power, majorities balanced by minorities, governments balanced by civil society, a free press, and the rule of law. As a final point, maybe the most difficult one: populist parties in Western and Eastern Europe are reaching down into the deep human longing for belonging, for meaning, for purpose and identity. An open society view of the world has to recognize those fears and anxieties, but has to be very resolute in saying that if you believe in open society, you believe in the adventure of modernity. You believe in living in a world where history has no libretto, a world in which you are not afraid to live with radical uncertainty about the future. Open society makes a very large demand that ordinary citizens can conquer the fears that modernity and change awaken in all of us. That may be its most austere demand, but also the one that calls us to our best.
One final remark may be in order. An open society has the hidden strength, in comparison to its authoritarian competitors, of a democratic epistemology. Its constitutions entrench power, and therefore knowledge, in competing institutions: the courts, the press, parliaments, oversight bodies, regulators, and last but not least, universities. It was Popper’s great insight that where knowledge is subjected to competitive evaluation and peer review by autonomous communities of scholars, theories that genuinely advance human progress can be tested and improved. The unseen advantage of open societies over authoritarian ones lies here, in their capacity to innovate, to unleash creative minds, and to turn their knowledge into insights, products, techniques, and systems that reduce human suffering and improve our life together. Single party states have made a very different bet: they are gambling that they can reconcile innovation and progress with political control and single party domination. The key unanswered question about how the twenty-first century turns out is which kind of epistemology, and therefore which kind of institutional form—open societies or single party states—will turn out to be the more successful, which society will best fulfill the needs and aspirations of their people. Put another way, the challenge for single party states is whether the kind of innovation that benefits their people can be sustained in regimes that practice authoritarian political control. In the past at least, regimes that privilege control over innovation have condemned their people to stagnation and entropy. Liberal political orders and the open societies they produce have made a different bet on the future. They have wagered that if power is checked and constrained by law, if it is forced to the test of adversarial justification, the resulting free debate creates the epistemological conditions for creativity and innovation, just as they create the conditions for a certain kind of individual, someone who embraces the discipline, rigor, and emancipatory possibilities of free thought. There is thus a necessary interdependence between liberal constitutionalism, open society, and the epistemology that creates progress in science and the arts. This is the bet that open societies have made about their future. This wager is—or should be—the basis of their confidence in their contest with the single party regimes of the twenty-first century.
Footnotes
[1] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge, 1945), 199–200.
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[2] Karl Popper, Logik Der Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934); Karl Popper, “Das Elend des Historizismus,” 1936.
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[3] Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64.
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[4] Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I: The Spell of Plato, 107.
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[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 9.
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[6] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter VII.
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[7] Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944).
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[8] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945), 288.
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[9] Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985).
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[10] Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
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