Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, offering one of the West's most influential articulations of liberal universalism. The book gathered principles the West holds dear: universalism, toleration, cosmopolitanism, individualism. Against the chauvinism native to political life, Popper proposed a higher allegiance to all mankind. That ideal now provides the moral architecture for Europe's approach to mass migration.
The moral axis of open and closed
Material interests on immigration diverge along class lines. Yet advocates of the open society recast this divergence along a psychological axis: open versus closed. Closedness becomes a failure of moral development. To remain on the correct side of this axis requires organising one's moral energies around what the author calls a boutique picture of reality, one that does not try to comprehend the common experience of receiving millions of migrants from very different societies, with the attendant dislocations.
These include the thinning of the social fabric and a retreat into further isolation, what the sociologist Robert Putnam called "hunkering down" in his study of the effects of diversity.
The ideal of the open society does not simply ignore the downsides of immigration, including rising rates of sexual violence. It gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those able to maintain it. Yet while a traditional potlatch is made possible by underlying asceticism, the renunciation demanded by today's leaders falls most heavily on those they rule. Embracing the open society becomes the ultimate luxury belief.
Popper's polemical structure
As the title's second half suggests, the open society is inherently polemical. It requires a foil of closedness. Popper writes that the magical, tribal or collectivist society will be called the closed society, while the society in which individuals confront personal decisions is the open society. The alternative to openness is tribalism and magic, or collectivist effacement of the individual. The paradigmatic activity of the open society is personal decision.
Popper's original advocacy carries over to those who speak today in the idiom of universal human rights, as opposed to the civil or political rights that attach to citizens of a particular, bounded nation. Anything bounded is closed. If the mindset of human rights is given to moral militancy, Popper's treatment helps us see that the agenda carries a literal military corollary.
The 1938 imperative that never ended
Popper's ideas had been germinating, but the final decision to write came in March 1938, the day he received news of the invasion of Austria. The proximate enemy was Nazism, the magical or tribal foe. He also took on communism, the collectivist enemy. Popper spoke for the third combatant, liberal democracy, the regime type that ultimately prevailed over both adversaries in the longer conflict stretching from the Anschluss through the Cold War. Arguably it is neither democratic in the literal sense of rule by the demos, nor liberal in the eighteenth-century sense of limited government. Rather, it is open.
The disposition animating the open society ideal invokes the Nazi threat ritualistically, so 1938 remains an emblematic moment. But the ideal slipped the bounds of any particular circumstance to become a permanent imperative, never satisfied so long as any concrete, circumscribed political community remains. The end of the war in no way relieved enthusiasts of their need for enemies.
Individualism as the only remedy
Both polemical orientations for Popper, Nazi racialist tribalism and Marxist collectivism, are forms of human association. The remedy for both is individualism. Popper appears historically obtuse in his failure to register non-malignant forms of association that can provide the basis for social order. He skips straight from the Nazi and communist threats to an equally radical counter-ideal of individualism meant to inoculate against both hazards. He comes across as reactive, unable to conceive of a social order mediating between individuals that would satisfy his ideal of openness.
The problem is that any established order is external to individual will. The open society is marked by personal decision. The freedom of the will is compromised when impinged upon by binding associations, such as family or nation, that are not chosen. To be innocuous, any association must be provisional, continually re-chosen on a case-by-case basis as circumstances shift. The open society becomes one of disengaged monads who come together episodically for exchange but have no deep or abiding connection.
A society of abstract relations
Popper recognises that an open society tends to become one of abstract relations. He is prescient. He sketches a society in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or telegrams, and who go about in closed motor cars. Artificial insemination would allow even propagation without a personal element. He offers this by way of exaggeration in 1943, but in 2026 it seems less so.
Given this thinned-out anthropology, Popper commends economics as the proper mode of social theory, because it treats human actors in their abstract relations of exchange. He condemns sociology, for example that of Durkheim, for its dogmatic belief that society must be analysed in terms of real social groups. It almost sounds as if the fact that they are real counts against them. We are not to dwell on the concrete differences of habit and character among different social groups. Ideally we would not even notice them, as such noticing could compromise allegiance to the open society and its corollary: permissive immigration policy. The open society will be a society of individuals denuded of qualities they acquire in association, as encultured beings. Openness seems to require positing sameness, so the variety of persons and peoples can be treated as a mass of interchangeable human resources.
Bureaucracy by another name
Popper and his political descendants have succeeded in attaching the word democracy, used as a term of approbation, to this imperative of abstraction and replaceability. A better name would probably be bureaucracy. Bureaucracy takes as its object of rule what Popper's contemporary Robert Musil called the Man Without Qualities.
The imperial project of openness
Popper recognises that achieving the open society will require a vigorous imperial project. What he had in mind, writing during the war, is not fully spelled out. But today's interventions in the internal affairs of putatively sovereign nations by transnational organs of openness capture the spirit of what Popper envisioned. Such organs include the European Commission, USAID and George Soros' Open Society Foundation. Popper was discreet enough to make his case for imperialism by historical proxy, treating the Peloponnesian War as a conflict between the open society of Athens and the closed society of Sparta.
For Popper, any criticism of Athenian imperialism can only be a cover for reaction. He claims Thucydides was an anti-democrat, and that all people of goodwill loved being ruled by Athens. He misapplies the term tribe to any city that resisted Athens' enlightened exactions of tribute or its beneficent control of commerce throughout the Aegean, made possible by naval superiority. Popper argues that tribalist exclusiveness and self-sufficiency could be superseded only by some form of imperialism, and that certain imperialist measures introduced by Athens were rather liberal.
Echoes in contemporary Europe
What Thucydides says sardonically, bringing out the confluence of Athens' high moral self-regard with her insatiable need for conquest, sounds very much like how Samantha Power or Ursula von der Leyen might scold the Hungarians today for their recalcitrant independence. But without Thucydides' irony.
Popper reads backward into the fifth century his own determination to defeat tribalist exclusiveness, which requires total hegemony of the enlightened. The word tribalism is frequently used by bien pensants to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as provincialism, a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. The political philosopher Pierre Manent pointed out that in a deliberately provocative way, the most archaic political form, traditionally the most despised, becomes the generic name for all political forms and human groupings that fall short of the Universal and Homogeneous State to be administered by a post-political clerisy of the open-minded.
The utopian paradox
The most efficient way to combat closed-mindedness is with open borders, global labour markets, and plenty of foreign interventions to keep up a steady flow of migrants and refugees. Invade the world, invite the world.
Popper argues against utopianism because it leads to totalitarianism. Yet it does not seem to bother him that his hope for a post-political condition is itself utopian and requires a total programme: an empire of openness from which no exit is to be countenanced.