Search Results

This chapter discusses the importance of progress in American society. Change is conceived as being largely synonymous with vitality, purpose, and direction, and is viewed as an integral and imperative feature of an open society. Political, economic, and social forms of progress are generally thought to occur in tandem and, especially so, in a social order like that of the United States which is traditionally geared to the emancipation of human potential for individual action and collective enterprise.

This chapter proposes that rights are best seen as a complex amalgam comprising a claim of entitlement to an end-state necessary to protect an interest which has sufficient weight to activate action to achieve it. A distinction is drawn between a strong and weak sense of rights. Examples are given of the assertion of rights claims through political and judicial processes. Particular attention is given to the nature of human rights and children's rights, and their place in personal law. The role of judicially protected rights within democracies is defended. It is argued that cultural rights should not be seen as the rights of groups to control members of the group, but of members of the group to choose to follow practices they see important to their identity. This should be respected as an aspect of the privileged sphere subject to observation of the pre-requisites of an open society.

This chapter argues that, as a political regime fighting for its consolidation, the French republic — in the immediate aftermath of one of the deepest crises it went through, (the Dreyfus case) — tried to articulate a political philosophy of its own that clearly distanced itself from authoritarian and illiberal features. This political philosophy stresses that modern freedom requires some material and social equality as a precondition and, in this aspect, it has an undeniable republican flavour. But the main point is that it also tries to demonstrate that such a combination of civil freedom and equality in material conditions is the kind of social and political regulation which is required by industrializing modern societies, so that the republic is clearly a proposition for the future and a form of open society, not a ‘closed community’ marred with archaism and nostalgia for tradition, brotherhood, and narrow patriotism.

Following on from the Preface, this chapter establishes the book's intention to critique the exercise of power of family practices against the values of an open society. As a background to understanding modern forms of family governance, it outlines the ‘welfarism’ thesis which maintains that family governance has moved from an era of instrumentalism, in which the legal form of family relationships was designed to promote the interests of the dominant member, through a welfarist phase, to an era where rights claims have attempted to re-align the sources of power over people's personal lives. This is illustrated by reference to divorce law and the legal treatment of homosexuality. Rights claims however rest on a fragile institutional basis. Nevertheless, the fragmentation of family forms they have precipitated suggests it may be better to see family law as the law relating to the personal lives of individuals, and therefore be more appropriately termed ‘personal’ law.

Part II of the volume takes up Hayek’s second unsettling thesis: that the Open Society is too complex for the practice of moral justification. To begin to analyze this unsettling thesis, it first considers the nature of the Open Society, and why it is characterized by extreme diversity and complexity. Thus the first section of this essay seeks to distinguish Millian and other liberalisms from the far more deeply diverse Open Society. It then argues that the Open Society is characterized by a process of autocatalytic diversity, which leads to ever-increasing complexity. This second essay concludes with an account of how the constitutive moral rules of the Open Society can be justified. It endorses Hayek’s criticism of social contract theory, proposing in its stead a self-organization model of moral justification.

As discussed in previous chapters, the main postulates outlined in the mission statements of these centers – in their imperative to build an institutional infrastructure for the art of the “open society,” which is to say “contemporary art” – amounted to an ideology of postsocialist artistic institutions and practices in the 1990s. But such statements were the fruit of various managerial-bureaucratic narratives woven in the Open Society Institute offices of New York and Budapest. The postsocialist or Soros contemporary had a clear managerial agenda, but it lacked an aesthetic or artistic program. This chapter examines a small segment of the vast ideological universe of new or neo-liberalism. It engages with the work of a few intellectuals who have left a deep impact not only on post-1989 reforms in Eastern Europe, but also on the world. The chapter looks into some of the ideas about art that were popular among a number of Central European intellectuals that were affiliated in some way or another with Karl Popper. Rather than consider their general social, scientific, and economic postulations – for which they have been celebrated by advocates of the free market, over the course of the past century – the chapter traces their artistic and aesthetic beliefs, seeking to comprehend the place of art in the ideological universe of Cold War liberalism. The chapter poses such questions as: What is the place of art in the “open society” that Soros, following Popper’s dream, decided to build in Eastern Europe?

This chapter considers the question of whether there can be a moral, liberal framework for the Open Society, which itself abjures the pursuit of the ideal while providing a framework for diverse individual perspectives on justice. It argues that such a framework of liberal diversity seems most likely when our public social world is shaped by a set of characteristic features of the Open Society. We now have had sufficient experience of life in diverse societies that we can at least draw some tentative conclusions about the sorts of institutional structures and principles that are friendly to diversity per se. However, even these diversity-friendly arrangements cannot make room for all perspectives. The chapter attempts to identify the limits of liberal diversity, and why these limits make sense in the context of defending the Open Society.

Barbados has long been severely criticized––or ignored––because of its adherence to British political and cultural traditions. Much of this censure and neglect was a result of its having had the most racially segregated social relations among the Caribbean nations. Paradoxically, the island has evolved to have the best educated populace and the most politically stable and economically open of societies in the Caribbean. The growth of a black business bourgeoisie is one of the paramount features of the island’s modernization.

This chapter explores the cultural and social aspects of China's cosmopolitan age. Open borders resulted not only in large flows of people moving in and out of the country, but also in active participation in international conferences and international covenants. There is no standard text in English on the diplomatic history of twentieth-century China. The extent to which China was an active agent seeking full participation in the international community — despite a very negative appraisal of its achievements in conventional history — is emphasized. In addition, it looks in more detail at the intellectual links forged at home with the rest of the world by cosmopolitan scholars in virtually every field of knowledge, from avionics to zoology. The existence of an open society allowed controversial styles to be explored, for instance nude photography.

This chapter raises the question of what light the evolutionary perspective set out by Henri Bergson in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion might shed on the subject of the theologico-political. It brings out Bergson's conception of philosophy's necessary conversion—to a different understanding of the power of time, together with its implications for “invention” in religion, ethics, art, and politics. It examines Bergson's “ontological pragmatism”, recalling that, for this thinker, “if time does nothing, it is nothing”. The morality and religion that Bergson describes in their function of providing social cohesion belong to closed societies: they would have no role to play in an open society. The chapter claims that Bergson's work should be interpreted as an endeavor to understand the age-old mystical impulse, at least in the definition he gives of mysticism.

The main aim of this chapter is to provide a summary of the institutional context and history of the SCCA network. And even though the book does not aim at providing a full historical reconstruction of the “Soros contemporary” – given the diverse complexity of this program implemented in eighteen countries – a general outline of the narrative is still necessary in order to proceed (in the next chapters) to examine the structural transformations credited to the Soros art network. The chapter is divided into four parts, starting with a general overview of the network’s mission, values, objectives, and achievements a concise discussion of the Soros Fine Arts Documentation Center, a small program established in the mid-1980s and which later served as a blueprint for the network an examination of the general process of bureaucratic implementation of the SCCA centers and an overview of the joined programs but also some major differences between these twenty centers. The chapter also discusses particular instruments used in the implementation of the program, such as the “SCCA Procedures Manual” which consisted of a set of instructions on how to open a center for contemporary art, headed by the logo of the SCCA network. These institutional elements are offered as examples of what united and negotiated the local nodes within this regional and trans-regional network.

Hayek contended that the Open Society has evolved beyond basic human inclinations and capacities. We will consider his three Unsettling Theses. First, that the Open Society is fundamentally at odds with our evolved moral intuitions. Second, that the Open Society’s complexity surpasses our capacity to understand the function and justification of its constitutive rules. Third, that the Open Society has evolved beyond our governance. These concerns apparently manifest in our daily politics. Because of the first, we are constantly tempted to morally renounce, and construct barriers to, The Open Society. Because of the second, our attempts to reflect on and reconstruct its rules generate unrelenting moral conflict. Because of the third, we lack the knowledge to competently improve the functioning of the Open Society, and so we are always disappointed with our politics. Hayek’s diagnoses of these systems, long dismissed, resonate with a large body of contemporary scientific work and thus merit deeper investigation and possible revision. This will be done across inquiries into each one of Hayek’s Unsettling Theses. The first inquiry considers the problem of our evolved moral nature, and whether we are by nature parochial egalitarians who rebel at diversity, inclusion and impartiality. The second inquiry analyses the Open Society itself, particularly its autocatalytic diversity and constant change. The third inquiry focuses on whether the open society is beyond governance.

Part I of the volume takes up an unsettling thesis advanced by F. A. Hayek: that our evolved, tribal, and egalitarian sentiments are in deep conflict with the impartiality and inclusiveness of the Open Society. Hayek, it argues, was correct that the core of human morality arose during the long hunter-gatherer period in our history. However, Hayek largely overlooked the extent to which human cooperation arose on the basis of strong reciprocity, and the way in which our egalitarianism is manifested in impartial norms that protect against bullying and domination. These features of what is deemed “the Modern Egalitarian Package” allow it to be scaled up to large impersonal moral networks.

This chapter argues that the well-ordered society is a dangerous illusion. The very aim that the ideal theorist cherished, to know justice and just social states as well as possible, requires an open, diverse society, in which innumerable perspectives simultaneously cooperate and compete, share and conflict. In this society there will be a crisscrossing network of communities exploring and refining moral ideals and gaining insights into their own ideals by their interactions with others. In order to be successful and robust, the Open Society must be based on a moral constitution that provides the basis of a practice of responsibility and accountability among a maximally wide array of perspectives, allowing us to reap the fruits of the cooperation and competition that diversity allows.

Chapter 7 examines two cases of how billionaires use philanthropy to promote social change in foreign countries. Through the massive funding of research and public–private partnerships, Bill Gates, via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has advanced international vaccination programs to fight communicable diseases. His influence on agenda-setting and policy implementation in the governance of global health can be seen in the World Health Organization’s declaration of a “Decade of Vaccines.” The second case is George Soros, whose attempts to build open societies as a “stateless statesman” are extremely wide-ranging. The chapter focuses on his efforts to promote human rights and democracy, putting the spotlight on his role in regime change during the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (2002–4).

Postcolonial Bergsonstudies the way Bergson’s “action at a distance” occurs in the encounter between the work of the French philosopher and the work of two thinkers from the colonial world: Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), from India, and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), from Senegal. Diagne lays out the outline for the four different chapters covered in Postcolonial Bergson.