open societies and closed societies
open societies and closed societiesThese terms were introduced by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), and further explored in The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper argued that both science and human history are essentially indeterminate and fluid. Applied to social theory, this produced Popper's lively and devastating attack on historicism. Theories such as those of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, which proposed the existence of laws of history and a knowable human destiny, were dismissed by Popper as scientifically insupportable and politically dangerous. He proposed that all such theories would lead to authoritarian and inhumane regimes, which he called closed societies because they were closed to the normal processes of change. Open societies by contrast were...
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