On the Nature of the Open Society

More than Tolerance and Indifference is Needed

In a recent essay, Eric Schliesser reflects on the nature of the open society, focusing on Gerald Gaus’s and Chandran Kukathas’s respective views. As usual with Eric, this is very interesting and suggestive, so I can only recommend it. Here, I just want to briefly expand on Eric’s discussion, acknowledging that I largely agree with what he says.

Eric notes that the notion of “open society,” while largely used in the political philosophy and economy literature, has hardly been precisely defined. Karl Popper attributes at least two features to the open society.[1] First, it is a society where individuals compete, both economically (to acquire goods and more generally to raise their standards of living) and politically (to acquire coercive power). As Popper puts it, “in an open society, many members strive to rise socially, and to take the places of other members.” Second, the open society tends to be “abstract” and “depersonalized.” In other words, in an open society, we do not know the identity of, or even do not meet the individuals who are nonetheless indirectly responsible for our fate. Social relations are mostly abstract in this sense, though there remains a smaller but nonetheless important set of more personalized relationships. This gives a first idea of the kind of society we are talking about but it’s probably not sufficient. After all, the communist regime of the Soviet Union would have also at least partially qualified. The impersonal nature that Popper ascribes to the open society is more generally a feature of bureaucratic rationalized societies where authority and legitimacy are essentially encapsulated in rules. As for the competitive nature of the open society, while it was surely more restricted in communist regimes, it was not totally absent, especially in the political domain.

That suggests that there is something more to the open society than the impersonality of the social relations and its competitive nature. Eric’s essay discusses Kukathas’s account, as it is in particular developed in his book The Liberal Archipelago.[2] Kukathas’s liberalism grants the fundamental right of association (and its corollary, the right of disassociation) an absolute priority over other liberal rights and principles. An implication is that the open society is foremost a society based on the value of tolerance, as he repeats in a recent lecture Eric is quoting in his essay. Now, there are several reasons to be skeptical that tolerance can serve as the foundation of the open society. Eric notes two of them. First, more than a value, tolerance is an ideal that is in practice hard to achieve. Not many persons will be able to live up to it. If really the nature of the open society depends on its members being genuinely tolerant of each other, then we have reason to doubt that the open society is possible at all. Second, tolerance is not incompatible and is actually susceptible to go along with majority-versus-minority and contempt-based social relations. In other words, tolerance does not imply respect or moral equality.

I think similar difficulties emerge when we turn to the kind of liberal politics that would prevail in Kukathas’s version of the open society. As I have discussed in a previous post, Kukathas claims that in a “liberal archipelago,” an extreme form of liberal restraint would have to be endorsed:

“The liberal state should thus take no interest in these interests or attachments – cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, or otherwise – which people might have. It should take no interest in the character or identity of individuals; nor should it be concerned directly to promote human flourishing: it should have no collective projects; it should express no group preferences; and it should promote no particular individuals or individual interests. Its only concern ought to be with upholding the framework of law within which individuals and groups can function peacefully. To be sure, upholding the rule of law may require intervention in the affairs of individuals and groups (and this may, unavoidably, have bearing on individual and group identity); but liberal politics is not concerned with these affairs in themselves. Indeed, it is indifferent to particular human affairs or to the particular pursuits of individuals and groups. Liberalism might well be described as the politics of indifference.”[3]

We can make the same remark about this “politics of indifference” as about the ideal of tolerance. It corresponds to a very demanding personal ethics that many would not be willing or be able to endorse. Gerald Gaus, whose account of the open society Eric also discusses in his essay, points out that the archipelago version of the open society is ruled out by naturalistic factors:

“when diverse populations split into isolated groups, we should expect either animosity or, at best, a sort of practical relativism. This, in turn, will tend to lessen the interest in reconciliation with the moral views of others, and so decrease the likelihood that there will be convergence on the justification of an impartial framework… As the Ostroms observed, ‘a highly-fragmented political system without substantial overlap’ is especially prone to conflict.”[4]

Tolerating others and refraining from interfering with practices that we don’t approve of is already naturally difficult. It becomes almost impossible when society is organized in such a fragmented way that members of different communities or associations don’t interact with each other regularly. Indeed, we already see in many Western societies the results of an increasing social and cultural segmentation. The consequences are a growing ideological polarization and the emergence of “bellicose politics” where civility, honesty, and commitment to truth are even no longer conceived as ideals.

Let me add a last objection that completes what has just been said. An open society grounded on a politics of indifference is one that fully disregards what Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the ancients” and what we tend to call today “political freedom.”[5] Political freedom, i.e., the right and ability to participate in collective decision-making and public affairs, is famously regarded by Constant as compatible with a complete negation of individuality and full submission of individuals to the tyrannical authority of the social whole. Nonetheless, Constant is also clear that the exercise of the “liberty of the moderns” carries with it the risk of making individuals completely disinterested in political matters.[6] Indeed, political freedom and modern liberty go hand-in-hand together:

“Individual freedom, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political freedom guarantees it; hence, political freedom is required. However, to ask people nowadays to sacrifice, as in ancient times, all their individual freedom from political freedom is the best way to alienate them from the former. Once done, they would soon lose the latter.”[7]

These remarks are echoed by Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous characterization of American democracy in terms of “equality of conditions.” Tocqueville notes that the passion for equality, while a constitutive feature of the democratic form of life that goes along with individual freedom and the liberty to pursue one’s interests, is also a potential source of tyranny. In a democracy, individuals are at the same time encouraged to retrieve within their private sphere and to disregard public affairs, while they are submitted to the growing pressure of public opinion. As they give up their political power, they progressively find themselves put under a new form of social authority – conformism – that they themselves contribute to create.

Like Gaus’s, Constant’s and Tocqueville’s observations are sociological and anthropological and may happen to be wrong, at least not to hold in some possible worlds. But casual experience and more scientific considerations suggest that they are mostly right for our actual world. An open society organized as an archipelago based on a politics of indifference would likely turn out to be unsustainable and prone to conflict. This would undermine the very basis on which it is supposed to rest because, at some point, the possibility of exiting and (dis)associating would no longer be effective.

We probably have to look elsewhere if we want to find an alternative basis for the open society. Gaus and Eric each hint at different foundations. As it happens, I think that they may also have to deal with the Constant-Tocqueville point that political freedom must be one way or another promoted within the open society. But this is a topic for future posts.

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[1] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 7th edition (Routledge, 1945 [2012]), p. 165-6.

[2] Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2007).

[3] Ibid., p. 249-50.

[4] Gerald Gaus, The Open Society and Its Complexities (Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 206.

[5] Benjamin Constant, De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes (Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits, 1819 [2010]).

[6] “The risk of modern liberty is that, as we are absorbed by the benefits of our private independence and the pursuit of our individual interests, we give up too easily our right to share political power.” Ibid., p. 616, my translation.

[7] Ibid., p. 612, my translation.