open societies and closed societies
- open societies and closed societies
These terms were introduced by Karl Popper in his book
The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), and further explored in
The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper argued that both science and human history are essentially indeterminate and fluid. Applied to social theory, this produced Popper's lively and devastating attack on
historicism . Theories such as those of Plato,
Hegel , and
Marx , which proposed the existence of laws of history and a knowable human destiny, were dismissed by Popper as scientifically insupportable and politically dangerous. He proposed that all such theories would lead to
authoritarian and inhumane regimes, which he called closed societies because they were closed to the normal processes of change. Open societies by contrast were based on the activity, creativity, and innovation of many individuals, and would develop unpredictably through
piecemeal social engineering . They are those societies in which social policies are monitored for unintended consequences, openly criticized, and altered in the light of such criticism. Such societies must be both
liberal and
democratic , in the sense that it must be possible to remove from office rulers who fail to respond to justified criticism. The implied contrast, of course, was between the
totalitarian regime of what was then the Soviet Union (as a closed society) and the Western democracies (as open societies).
Popper's arguments were rightly seen as decisive logical refutation of the very foundations of
Marxism -both its claim to scientific status, and its claim to reveal the course of future history.
Dictionary of sociology.
2013.
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