ABSTRACT
As the editors of this volume, Liviu Matei and I settled on the title “Open Society Unresolved” for two main reasons: One is that open society has always been a contested concept; it has been vaguely (if at all) defined by its original architects, and its precise meaning has remained elusive ever since. The second is that many of the questions that surround the idea of an open society are still—and will remain—unresolved. There is, in fact, a good reason why Karl Popper, the thinker who popularized the term “open society,” was so smitten by Michael Oakeshott’s expression of a “politics of conversation” to capture the open-endedness of open societies. 1 For in a genuinely open society, solutions to moral, social, and political questions can only be tentative and must remain open to contestation; there can, in other words, be no final “once and for all” solutions. Inevitably, then, the question(s) of open society will remain unresolved, and they will—as they always have been—be confronted on contested terrain.
