LSE Press · 2024 · Open Access

The Open Society as an Enemy

A critique of how free societies turned against themselves

by J. McKenzie Alexander

London School of Economics

Nearly eighty years ago, Karl Popper offered a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society. Today, many of the values he defended are once again under threat — and, increasingly, treated by their inheritors as vices rather than virtues. Populist agendas of left and right alike challenge the principles that underpin liberal democracy. Cosmopolitanism, transparency, the free exchange of ideas, and a sense of common life have, for many, become objects of suspicion.

Drawing on philosophy, social science, and the history of ideas, this book examines how that inversion came about, what is at stake in it, and why a renewed defence of the Open Society now requires more than the piecemeal reforms Popper himself advocated. It is a forensic and, at times, polemical re-examination of an inheritance worth fighting for — and worth rethinking.

01About the book

The Open Society is a Rorschach concept — its meaning depends on what each of us projects onto it. Rather than treat that as a defect, this book takes the projections seriously, identifying four distinct families of ideas that the phrase has come to bear, and asking what each amounts to once interrogated. The four are not merely listed but cross-examined: their internal tensions, their unintended consequences, and the ways in which advancing one can inadvertently curtail another.

Where Popper argued for piecemeal social engineering — fighting the most urgent evils one at a time — this book argues that the predicament of the Open Society in the twenty-first century cannot be addressed piecemeal. The interconnections are too tight, the externalities too large. What is needed instead is what the book calls multifaceted social engineering: a willingness to think globally about the kind of society we want, and to make trade-offs along dimensions that are not obviously commensurable. The book closes by sketching what such a perspective might involve.

02Four conceptions of the Open Society

The book is organised around four senses of the Open Society — each treated in its own Part, each interrogated in turn before being brought back together in the conclusion.

  1. ICosmopolitan

    The Open Society as a global community shaped by universal values — and the questions raised by borders, immigration, and the free movement of people.

  2. IITransparent

    The Open Society as a place of visibility and disclosure — and what happens when our lives become legible to the state, to corporations, and to one another.

  3. IIIEnlightenment

    The Open Society as a marketplace of ideas — and the limits of that metaphor in an age of trigger warnings, no-platforming, and the politics of safe spaces.

  4. IVCommunitarian

    The Open Society as a fabric of mutual recognition — and the strain placed on it by polarisation, intersectional identities, and the fracturing of common life.

03Topics covered

  • Rorschach concepts & political language
  • Borders and the economics of migration
  • Surveillance, privacy & the panopticon
  • Genomic data and the right to be forgotten
  • Trigger warnings and safe spaces
  • No-platforming and academic freedom
  • Polarisation and the geography of opinion
  • Social identity and in-group bias
  • WINOs, authenticity and group policing
  • Intersectionality and tribal fragmentation
  • Epistemic closure and extreme groups
  • Piecemeal vs. multifaceted social engineering

04Reviews

  • I'm not sure I've ever read a work of political philosophy as forensic and yet so full of heart and humour as Jason McKenzie Alexander's The Open Society as an Enemy. Many people have waded into the culture wars, but very few have rigorously and engagingly examined why the way we think about each other is changing. Alexander probes the assumptions we make about contemporary society and exposes who benefits from outrage and polarisation.

    — Ros Taylor, author of The Future of Trust

  • An intellectually rich contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the future of liberal democracies … Alexander's critique of the Open Society's value inversions is timely and thought-provoking. For readers interested in the interplay between philosophy, politics, and systemic reform, this book provides a valuable starting point for rethinking the ideals of an Open Society in the face of twenty-first-century challenges.

    — Mazlum Özkan, LSE Review of Books

05About the author

J. McKenzie Alexander

J. McKenzie Alexander is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics, where he served as Head of Department from 2018 to 2021 and as one of LSE's Academic Governors from 2012 to 2018. His research interests include evolutionary game theory, decision theory, and the philosophy of social science.

His earlier books include The Structural Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, 2007) and Evolutionary Game Theory (Cambridge Elements, 2023).

06Related work