Abstract
In this paper, I shall argue that to no small extent, difficulties in the distinction between open and closed societies derive from unexamined assumptions about what constitutes a closed society. That concept has assimilated a family of concepts — tyranny, despotism, absolute monarchy, dictatorship, and totalitarianism — which has been far less subject to analysis and criticism than those polar concepts associated with liberty, consent, legitimacy, and obligation.1 Concepts of total domination, as I shall refer to them, are political, deployed not only by theorists, social scientists, and philosophers, but also by statesmen and publicists. Such concepts may be applied in a partisan and polemical spirit, and directed to practical purposes: to identify, categorize, and discredit arrangements regarded by the theorists as antithetical to, or incompatible with those making for political freedom or some other good on which he places supreme value. Often the members of a state or of an alliance are mobilized against enemies by attributing to them the desire to impose total domination. Thus the Greeks stigmatized the Persians as despotic in much the same way as the Christians were to treat the Turks. What we need to know about every theory of total domination is its context. Is it framed by those claiming title to exercise total domination, or by political opponents who seek to fix upon their targets a name of sinister repute?
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References
This point is developed and illustrated with regard to the concept of despotism in my article, “The History of the Concept of Despotism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology (London, 1951), p. 41.
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Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1961), pp. 18–19.
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Karl R. Popper, “On Reason and the Open Society,” Encounter, XXXVIII Sociology, XII (1971), p. 278.
Karl R. Popper, “On Reason and the Open Society,” Sociology, XII (1971), p. 278.
Ibid.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (2 vols; 4th ed., revised; London, 1962), I, 1.
I. Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Paris, 1942), pp. 126–127. Cited and translated by Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim (London, 1973), p. 505n.
Written to thank Celestin Bougie for his book, Bilan de la sociologie Française. Ms. Letter, Henri Bergson to Celestin Bougie, May 10, 1935. The reference: to Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris, 1932).
Bergson, Deux sources…, p. 22.
Ibid., p. 286.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (5 vols; 2d ed., London, 1877), I, Ch. X, p. 577.
Ibid., p. 584.
Ibid., p. 580.
Bergson, Deux sources, p. 294.
Ibid., pp. 294–295.
Ibid., p. 295.
Popper, The Open Society…, I, 202.
Ibid., I, 181.
Ernest Gellner, “Concepts and Society,” in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford, 1970), p. 45.
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© 1974 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Richter, M. (1974). Some Views of the Closed Society. In: Germino, D., Von Beyme, K. (eds) The Open Society in Theory and Practice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2056-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2056-5_6
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