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Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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Popper has received more critical celebration of late in the West, both in symposia such as Popper's Open Society after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Karl Popper, (2) and in a massive biography, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, by Malachi Haim Hacohen. (3) Unlike his Chinese acolytes, these scholars are keenly interested in what Popper says about the closed society. Popper begins: "In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society." Closed societies differ among themselves but all are marked by "their magical or irrational attitude towards the customs of social life, and the corresponding rigidity of those customs." Their taboos and obligations exempt men from moral problems: there is never any doubt about how to act. What must be done might be difficult but it involves no personal responsibility, only a group responsibility based on magical ideas. In l ater editions, following Hayek, Popper identified the closed/open contrast with that between concrete social relations, which are face-to-face and personal, with abstract relations, which are impersonal and anonymous. As the latter come to predominate, Popper theorized, the society moves from closed to open.

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Popper was never one for definitions (not out of laziness but on closely argued logical grounds), so what he says about the open society has to be pieced together. He did not identify open societies with any particular political or economic regime--not with free-market capitalism, for which, as a social democrat and former Marxist he had little sympathy, nor with political democracy, in which he saw little but a mechanism for voting governments out of office. (Hayek had this same blinkered vision of democracy as something that happens once every two, four or seven years, rather than the procedures of everyday public life.) The open society is simply the locus of "the traditions of a free people", the site of myriad personal decisions. It liberates the critical facilities of human beings.

Actually, there is little to be gained from more elaborate definitions; on the contrary, it is easy to exaggerate the differences between closed and open and end up with useless "ideal types" that have never really existed. Besides, no matter how stark the contrast, such contrast does not by itself necessarily entail clash or conflict. Closed societies can stew in their own juice indefinitely and disturb no one else, while the era of directly forcing modernity on "backward" (traditional) peoples was one chapter--the "colonial" one--that is now concluded in the history of the open society. What interested Popper--and it is the main reason we bother today with the concept of the open and the closed society--is what can go wrong in the transition from one to the other when modernizing forces are unleashed within a traditional culture.

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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