slug: open-society name: Open Society category: Political Philosophy type: concept

Open Society

Definition & Origins

The open society is a form of social organization built on the recognition of fallibility: since no person, party, or ideology can possess ultimate truth, institutions must be designed to correct errors — through free elections, the rule of law, independent courts, a free press, minority rights, and the protection of critical thinking. Its opposite, the closed society, is built on a claim to final truth — religious dogma, fascist nationalism, communist ideology — enforced by suppressing dissent.

George Soros took the concept directly from Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), which he read as a student at the London School of Economics after surviving two closed societies: Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944 (where, as a fourteen-year-old Jew, he narrowly escaped deportation and death) and the communist regime that followed. "The formative experience of my life was the German occupation of Hungary in 1944," he wrote in My Philanthropy (2011). Popper's book gave his experience a philosophy: it argued that the idea that our understanding is inherently imperfect is the only secure basis for a free society.

Soros made the concept the organizing principle of his life twice over: as a theory, it is the political extension of his epistemology (reflexivity applied to society); as a practice, it is the mission of the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy he has endowed with more than $32 billion of his own fortune (see political philanthropy).

Core Ideas

Fallibility is the foundation. An open society does not claim to know the truth and organize around it; it claims the opposite. Because certainty is unavailable, the best a society can do is institutionalize self-correction — elections to replace bad rulers, courts to check power, science and a free press to expose error. This is why Soros describes open society as "a more sophisticated form of social organization than a closed society" (Who Lost Russia?, 2000): in a closed society "there is only one concept of how society should be organized, the authorized version, which is imposed by force. In an open society citizens are not only allowed but required to think for themselves."

Open society is not market society. A distinctive Soros point: after the Cold War he insisted that the open society's enemies now include not only totalitarians but also market fundamentalism — the belief that market values alone can organize society. An open economy needs regulation, transparency, and public goods; a society run purely on self-interest loses the cohesion that freedom requires.

Open society is permanently endangered. It has no final victory. "Open society will always have its enemies, and each generation has to reaffirm its commitment to open society for it to survive" (Davos 2018). Its openness is also its weakness: it tolerates the intolerant, which demagogues exploit. Hence Soros's late-career urgency about Trump, Orbán, Putin, and Xi.

It demands more of citizens than it offers rulers. Soros stresses that open society is not merely a constraint on government but a burden on citizens: in a closed society the authorized doctrine relieves people of the need to think; in an open society they are "required to think for themselves." Freedom, in this framing, is a discipline — the willingness to live without final answers — which is one reason open societies periodically tire of themselves and hand power to those who promise certainty.

It is a universal, not Western, value. Soros insists the open society is not a cultural export but a universal aspiration rooted in the shared human condition of fallibility — a point he presses in Toward Open Societies and his defenses of foundation work across Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc.

Practical Application

The foundations. Beginning with scholarships for Black South Africans under apartheid (1979) and a foundation in Hungary (1984), Soros built a network that at its peak operated in more than 100 countries: supporting dissidents, independent media, legal reform, public health, Roma education and integration (Spanish Leadership for Europe's Roma, Empowering Europe's Roma), drug-policy reform, and higher education. The Soros Foundations Network is his own account of this project.

Institution building. The flagship is Central European University, founded in 1991 to sustain critical thinking in the post-communist region — later forced out of Hungary by Viktor Orbán, an episode Soros treats as the emblem of open society's retreat (Termites Are Devouring Hungary). In 2020 he committed $1 billion to launch the Open Society University Network (OSUN), announced in Davos 2020 as "the most important project of my life."

Political advocacy. Soros applies the open/closed framework as live political analysis: Putin's Russia as the archetypal closed mafia state (Who Lost Russia? through Munich 2023); Xi Jinping's China as "the most dangerous opponent of open societies" (Davos 2019, see China & authoritarianism); AI-driven surveillance as a new instrument of closed control (AI & control); and the defense of democratic institutions at home in the United States (US Democracy Under Concerted Attack).

The enemy taxonomy. Across five decades Soros applies the same test to successive adversaries: does the system claim final truth and enforce it? Nazism and Stalinist communism failed it absolutely; market fundamentalism fails it epistemically (claiming markets are self-correcting natural law); the mafia state fails it structurally (Orbán's Hungary, Putin's Russia, where power serves private enrichment); and the AI-surveillance state threatens to fail it technologically, making the authorized version of truth literally inescapable. The taxonomy explains the continuity of his targets better than any party-political reading.

Common Misconceptions

"Open society means open borders / laissez-faire." The term is often confused with free trade, open immigration, or libertarianism. Soros's open society is a political-epistemological ideal — institutions for error-correction — not a policy on any single question. He has himself argued for regulating markets and managing migration far more actively than the caricature suggests (his migration essays).

"It is Western cultural imperialism." Soros answers that fallibility is a universal human condition, and that closed regimes, not open societies, are the ones that impose a single truth by force. The foundations' method — local staff, local priorities — was designed against the imperial model.

"Soros uses 'open society' as a brand for his political preferences." The concept genuinely constrains him: he has defended the rights of those who attack him (including, in principle, Orbán's right to win elections), and his theory explicitly admits his own views are fallible — a claim no closed ideology can make.

"Open society has already won / is utopian." Soros calls open society "a desirable but unattainable goal" — an ideal to approximate, never a finished state. History, in his reading, oscillates: "Each generation has to reaffirm its commitment."

Soros's Own Words

Thought Evolution

Key Writings & Related Concepts