Blackwell Reference Online

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The phrase has now entered the vocabulary of politics, being quite commonly employed by leader writers and politicians, though hardly by the lay person. It is usually used to denote a society where no ideology or religion is given a monopoly, where there is a critical interest in new ideas whatever their source, where political processes are open to public examination and criticism, where there is freedom to travel and where restrictions on trade with other countries are minimal, and where the aim of education is to impart knowledge rather than to indoctrinate. The term ‘open society’ (together with its antonym, ‘closed society’) first gained currency from a famous book by Karl Popper (1945). As he acknowledged, this pair of terms had been introduced previously by Henri Bergson (1932). These two thinkers' conceptions of a closed society had much in common. Both saw it as a small, tightly knit, face-to-face community. According to Bergson, it is a centralized, static and unprogressive society, its religion authoritarian, its morality absolutist, its customs rigid. Popper stressed its antiscientific, magical, tribalist outlook. A point made by Bergson but not by Popper was that war with neighbouring societies will usually be seen by the leadership of a closed society as a desirable way of fostering tribal loyalty and corporate unity. However, their conceptions of an open society diverged ... log in or subscribe to read full text