The Open Society

There shall be no escape from the empire of openness.

In his 1943 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper offered one of the early articulations of “the open society” as an ideal. It is an ideal that gathers up some of the West’s dearest principles: universalism, toleration, cosmopolitanism, individualism. As against the chauvinism that is native to political life, the ideal of the open society …