Can open societies survive?
The great question of our age
For two years now, the great democracies have confronted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Backing millions of brave Ukrainians, the U.S. and its allies have helped repel Russian conquest. This military rally symbolized the rallying of liberal order itself — though now, House Republicans’ dithering under pressure from their presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump has renewed doubt.
Before 2016, liberal democracy felt secure despite our social fissures and frequent misgovernance. The last eight years, however, have seen the prominent rise of ideologies hostile to our liberal order. These include Critical Theorists on the left and Catholic integralists on the right. The new left views liberalism as a fig leaf for oppression, while the new right sees it as anti-Christian and authoritarian. I have argued that low trust and high polarization fuel these movements. Slower innovation and weaker economic growth have also contributed. While the challengers of liberal democracy have felt empowered by events, until recently its defenders suffered from a sense of confusion and disarray.
Political philosopher Gerald Gaus (1952-2020) was a leading defender of a liberal order. Gaus thought an open, liberal society helped people live peaceful and productive lives and generated innovation and social improvements. Diverse people in these orders can form rich relations of love, friendship, and trust. Open societies have costs but are dynamic, innovative, inclusive of diverse people and ideas — and resilient.
Today many resist Gaus’ optimism, including many liberals. As anti-liberal movements rise, we must examine the viability of open societies. Indeed, that examination may be our era’s greatest challenge. Gaus insisted that liberal societies can address their challenges within a liberal framework: liberal order can fix itself without a revolution.
Just before his death in 2020, Gaus finished his final work, The Open Society and Its Complexities. The book asks if humans are suited for the liberal, open societies that have emerged in the last century. It’s a complex but groundbreaking book. In this essay, I outline its defense of liberal order for a general audience. I believe it can help restore our confidence in liberal institutions.
Should we be pessimistic about the open society?
For Gaus, as for others, an open society doesn’t promote one idea of good or justice, as it allows people to make personal decisions that conflict with the traditions and norms of the majority. By contrast, closed societies have strong norms that dictate most members’ choices. The key feature of an open society is that its central norms do not direct people towards a single ultimate end. Rather, citizens can pursue a profusion of ends of their own choosing.
Such societies, Gaus admitted, are new, and in many ways, rare. And he understood why even many liberals were pessimistic about the capacity of open orders to survive.
Gaus addressed this liberal pessimism by engaging it, especially as articulated in Friedrich Hayek’s work. Hayek, a famous classical liberal economist, was a strong advocate for open societies, yet after witnessing mid-century Europe’s descent into totalitarianism, he grew skeptical about whether open orders can survive. Hayek struggled especially with three questions:
1. Is human nature fit for an open society?
2. Is the open society beyond justification?
3. Can the open society be governed?
Gaus found these concerns significant. To answer Hayek in depth, Gaus marshaled tools from many disciplines. He argued that human nature is fit for open societies, though not optimized for them.
Is human nature suited for liberalism?
As Hayek argued, humans are tribal by nature, and the open society developed from “the small group to the settled community.” These tribal origins gave us two desires: a desire for shared moral ends, and the drive for equality. Hayek worried that these drives meant that the open society contradicts our core moral feelings.
That’s because modern, open societies are complex systems guided by general principles. These principles don’t drive people towards shared, ultimate goals. In this sense, liberal order restricts our natural drive to pursue shared objectives, but our ancient minds will always crave the moral simplicity of the small group. (Though Gaus argued that tribes must also harmonize diverse moral values.)
Our brains thus evolved with tribal impulses that open societies may struggle to overcome. These emotions often drive us to focus too much on equality, which may lead us to restrict or damage open societies, limiting innovation and inclusion.
Gaus drew on modern anthropology to show that humans are an “egalitarian species.” He reframed our inclination for equality as a political, not economic, impulse. We sometimes desire equal distribution of resources, yes. But we express far more animus towards those who control us or boss us around than towards those who simply have more.
Tribes did have (usually male) leaders, although other males could create alliances to limit their power, and as Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue, strong norms also bounded personal power. So, we are not against all hierarchy, though we often find hierarchy excessive. This resistance helps us adapt to open societies based on equal treatment and freedom. Open societies can harness our wariness of hierarchical control, reduce the power of the strong over the weak, and allow people to exit systems of oppression. Our aversion to hierarchy implies that an open society can suit our nature.
Hayek’s first worry is thus misplaced. Our tribal instincts can endanger liberal institutions. However, the best accounts of our tribal nature emphasize our resistance to hierarchy, and an open society can meet that evolutionary desire, if not our desire for shared ends.
What legitimizes the open society?
Hayek’s second concern is less familiar. He asks if the open society is too intricate and chaotic to uncover what justice requires. For example, we can’t use utilitarian standards to justify open systems. Utilitarianism requires an analysis of costs and benefits that must rely on more data than we can gather.
Complexity theorists claim that variables in social systems have feedback relations that grow so large that no one can predict how such systems will behave. While tribal societies are not complex, open societies are, and open societies must somehow overcome their inherent complexity to reach moral justification.
Gaus tackled this problem of justification with bottom-up moral reasoning—a new social contract theory inspired by Hayek. Gaus rejects a social contract based on shared principles of justice, such as that of John Rawls (and Gaus’s own early work). Yes, we could justify a shared conception of justice if people would agree to it, but such an agreement is unlikely.
Better to justify social rules to diverse, conflicting moral viewpoints. For Gaus, a society’s process of selecting social rules isn’t a single moment of collective choice. It is instead an ongoing, connected social interaction that produces an emergent order. Gaus imagined a spontaneous-order agreement on the terms of social life, which addresses Hayek’s concerns about moral justification. Moral justification can develop as a spontaneous order in a complex system.
In Gaus’ social contract, diverse people can individually choose to obey social rules. Gaus allowed these social contractors to disagree about their desire to compromise. Some contractors may hold out for rules they like most, but others will gravitate towards practices they find less than ideal in order to secure social cooperation. If we let these people interact, Gaus claimed, we might see more consensus on rules than expected. The reason is that people in diverse orders will not only disagree on what a given rule should be, but also how heavily they weigh that disagreement. A person who disagrees with a social rule but does not feel strongly about it will likely accommodate proponents of the rule who care deeply about it. Indeed, more uniform populations may generate less agreement than diverse populations. In this way, Gaus argues that a society of diverse perspectives can create more unity and agreement than a society of homogeneous views.
(Gaus’s computational model allows agents to disagree about when to compromise on non-ideal social rules. Gaus did not argue that his model was accurate, but rather a “proof of concept” that diversity can generate consensus.)
We can make stable, cooperative connections only when “public justification” happens. Social rules reach public justification when each person accepts them for good reasons. A social order, comprised of social rules, then achieves public justification when citizens have adequate reason to affirm its rules. If we approve our shared rules, we can live well with others and enjoy the advantages of social exchange and discovery. Gaus believed public justification was essential for moral justification: an emergent public justification completes the moral justification of open societies. A “top-down” moral justification would fail.
Is liberalism ungovernable?
Hayek’s third concern was that, as a complex system with inscrutable feedback relations, the open society makes self-governance difficult. Even if our system is morally justified, we may not be able to manage it for long, or at all. Society could collapse.
To address this challenge, Gaus broke governance down into three parts: pursuing goals, dealing with strategic challenges, and creating self-governance structures:
1. Pursuing goals: We sometimes aim for specific results when selecting public policies.
2. Strategic challenges: Coordinating can be tricky owing to clashing interests.
3. Self-governance issues: Governing ourselves is difficult because disagreements hinder collective decision-making.
Gaus asked whether societies can solve these problems at the macro, meso, and micro levels. He agreed with Hayek that we could not steer the system at the macro level, and so, inspired by the Ostroms’ research on collective action, Gaus focused on micro-approaches.
Elinor and Vincent Ostrom studied the management of common pool resources. These are goods with both public and private aspects. Communities must consume these goods together but they can also exclude non-members from using them. Fisheries and grazing pastures are examples. Traditional economic models predict a tragedy of the commons for such resources, but the Ostroms found that people could develop rules to manage them.
Gaus drew on the Ostroms’ findings to propose that we can create a social contract at the local level. We can then tackle meso-level challenges using insights from the micro level. Middle-tier governance structures can observe successful local experiments and then share those results within their network.
At the macro level, Gaus endorsed markets and democracy as tools for collective self-governance. Both institutions find and share local information and innovations. Even so, macro-governance has limited objectives: it must only uncover, gather, and share local data and innovations. Markets and democracy, when well-organized, serve as collaborative decision-making processes that can help us manage complex systems.
Due to the complexity, technocracy is unlikely to improve these methods. Gaus was suspicious of opaque, technocratic elites. Although this skepticism has anti-liberal roots, Gaus believed liberals should also be wary. Elites know too little to govern.
Gaus offered well-reasoned hope to friends of open orders. Hayekian pessimism becomes cautious Gausian optimism about the viability of the open society.
Can we defend open societies?
Gaus knew that open societies could weaken themselves. He notes Schumpeter’s maxim that capitalism is good at supporting its critics. So, The Open Society and Its Complexities is no mere response to Hayek. Its aim is to create a research program to study open societies. To protect open societies, we must study complex systems we barely understand.
And so, Gaus ended the book on a positive note. An open society is
an ever-increasing and relentless engine of diversity and inclusivity. It can be slowed and can even wane for a time, but only great and sustained coercion can truly put the brake on it. When some avenues are blocked, the Open Society’s niche creation and innovation manifest themselves elsewhere. Even those who are willing to employ great and systematic coercion to control it find that as they block one avenue of diversity, others crop up. … the enemy of the Open Society cannot stop it by halting this or that exploration. For a time, opponents of diversity and openness may check exploration, creativity, diversity, and freedom, but the forces propelling the new civilization proclaimed by Popper and Hayek cannot long be contained. The real question is whether we can understand the possibilities and constraints of this complex civilization, or struggle against it, seeking a mastery that will elude us.
The power of open societies is evident. Attempts to enforce moral uniformity in diverse societies can lead to backlash, as seen in the cultural left’s push for rapid social change. Conservative governments grow bolder. Center-right parties, which blend economic centrism and cultural conservatism, have flourished in Europe. In the U.S., opposition to left-wing extremism gave us the Trump presidency and Elon Musk’s Twitter. Open societies generate surprises.
Authoritarian control can result in much greater problems, as we see in Russia and China. Experts predicted Russia would overrun Ukraine, but Ukraine has managed to resist. China’s once-admired zero-Covid policy wound up sparking potential revolt. Governments that suppress diversity reveal the attraction of open orders.
Open societies can collapse due to human nature, but they also challenge their adversaries. Authoritarian regimes may soon succumb to new sources of chaos as they struggle to close their increasingly open orders, for they do not understand the nature of the societies they despise. Failure may not produce exhaustion, as some may pursue a full-scale revolution, but they court even more disastrous outcomes.
The Open Society and Its Complexities demonstrates that our semi-egalitarian human nature doesn’t threaten open order. Liberal orders can justify their existence and govern themselves. In contrast, illiberal regimes appear fragile. Their authoritarianism clashes with our deep-rooted egalitarianism more than a liberal order does. They cannot justify themselves because they limit discussion and exchange; they cannot govern themselves for similar reasons. Instead, they treat citizens as disposable tools for furthering their collective goals.
Diversity and disagreement are human universals. Open societies better manage this ancient reality.
Open societies are young, as are defenses of open order. We need a comprehensive defense that is interdisciplinary and substantive, and that explores new questions using innovative intellectual methods. The Open Society and Its Complexities calls us to defend our civilization through rich collective study and careful, practical reform.
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