Open Society as an Achievement: Popper, Gaus, and The Liberal Tradition

The idea of “open society” has experienced a small revival within academic political philosophy in the United States since the publication of Gerald Gaus’s The Tyranny of the Ideal (2016). ¹ Of course, “open society” has been an influential theme in public discourse since Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945 (1966a, 1966b), and it has continued to engage thinkers across the political spectrum through the work of the Open Society Foundations, related academic organizations like the Open Society University Network, and think tanks like the Niskanen Center (Niskanen 2022). ² But within American analytic philosophy departments, the idea of open society has largely ceased to frame debates about the nature of a sustainable liberal political order. This is unfortunate at a time when broad church liberalism needs a robust defense against authoritarian threats, dogmatic partisans, and the decline of liberal democratic norms in many countries. The attention Gaus and others have paid to the idea of open society is, therefore, a welcome development, but I worry that some leading ideas in that revival fail to meet our political moment.