The National Interest
Spring 2002

Popper's Return Engagement: The Open Society in an Era of Globalization

by Neil McInnes

 

. . . 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 later 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. . . .

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.

What can happen, said Popper, is that the privileged, educated strata of the old order (not the common people, who are merely uncomfortable with the new ways) can seek to arrest the opening up of a society they have been used to rule. They will resort to violence, impose tyranny, begin a reign of terror against the innovators. They will seek the support, including even the armed intervention, of any other closed society that has managed to arrest modernizing trends. They will attack prominent symbols of the open society wherever they find them. Although their slogan is "back to the society of our fathers", they themselves are "morally rotten"; nihilism is common among them. And they will try to wrap the whole business in "a hypocritical and even cynical exploitation of religious sentiments." Although educated themselves, they will lead what soon becomes a "revolt against reason and freedom." . . .