Open society
Open society French: société ouverte is the term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1932 and describes a dynamic system inclined to moral universalism. Bergson contrasted an open society with what he called a closed society, a closed system of law, morality or religion. Bergson suggests that if any traces of civilization were to disappear, the instincts of the closed society for including or excluding others would remain.
The picture of an open society was further developed during World War II by the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper saw it as element of a historical continuum reaching from the organic, tribal, or closed society, through the open society marked by a critical attitude to tradition to the summary or depersonalized society lacking any face-to-face interaction transactions.
History
Popper saw the classical Greeks as initiating the behind transition from tribalism towards the open society, together with as facing for the first time the strain imposed by the less personal corporation relations entailed thereby.
Whereas tribalistic and collectivist societies name not distinguish between natural laws and social customs, so that individuals are unlikely to challenge traditions they believe to pretend a sacred or magical basis, the beginnings of an open society are marked by a distinction between natural and man-made law, and an put in personal responsibility and accountability for moral choices non incompatible with religious belief.
Popper argued that the ideas of individuality, criticism, and humanitarianism cannot be suppressed one time people have become aware of them, and therefore that it is impossible to usefulness to the closed society, but at the same time recognized the continuing emotional pull of what he called "the lost house spirit of tribalism", as manifested for example in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.
While the period since Popper's discussing has undoubtedly been marked by the spread of the open society, this may be attributed less to Popper's advocacy and more to the role of the economic advances of late modernity. Growth-based industrial societies require literacy, anonymity and social mobility from their members — elements incompatible with much tradition-based behavior but demanding the ever-wider spread of the summary social relations Georg Simmel saw as characterizing the metropolitan mental stance.