Visualizing Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies

Every generation of intellectual, cultural, and political elites, from antiquity to the present, has characterized its society as being suboptimal in some respect, or heading down the wrong track, or spiraling into decay and toward oblivion, or else becoming incomprehensibly and disconcertingly complex due to social and political evolution, technological developments, population growth, demographic shifts, and so on. A key to analyzing these characterizations lies in understanding the ways in which a society vacillates between being “open”—that is, to the extent that its political and administrative structures accommodate change without bloodshed—and, conversely, becoming “closed” to the possibility of peaceful change. Open societies, desirable as they are, nevertheless contain seeds of their own destruction due to conflicting political ideologies and social visions, to competing private interests that are contrary to open societies’ overarching purposes, and to natural social, economic, and political cycles. Defensive bulwarks against these intrinsic “enemies” are essential for sustaining an open society. This article visualizes and evaluates the open society’s nature, and advances two constitutionally feasible defenses against its enemies.