Minima Moralia: is there an ethics of the open society?

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the political establishment, along with the rest of the world, needed to make sense of events, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1945/1966) enjoyed a second birth. Its new relevance, due primarily to Popper’s typology of “closed” and “open” political systems, was especially obvious in Eastern and Central Europe: the book was perhaps the only theoretical framework available in which the daunting challenge behind the unfolding events was put into proper perspective.