The Open Society and Its New Enemies
What Karl Popper’s classic can teach us about the threats facing democracies today.
I.
The idea of historical inevitability has transfixed philosophers, theologians, and politicians for millennia. From the Apostles awaiting the second coming of Christ to the Marxists who looked forward to the collapse of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the conviction that the future is already written has an intoxicating allure. In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper described this belief as “historicism” and argued that it is among the most destructive concepts humanity has ever devised.
Popper argued that historicism is a path to totalitarianism. It encourages leaders to adopt a ruthless ends-justify-the-means mentality, as human suffering and other costs today—no matter how huge—will always be excused by the glorious new world of tomorrow. It’s anti-rational and anti-scientific, as any new development or information can be hammered into a shape that will fit historicist prophecy. And it invites callous social engineering because it encourages political leaders to think of themselves as facilitators of an inescapable destiny rather than public servants responsible for the well-being of citizens right now.
Popper traced the intellectual lineage of historicism from Heraclitus and Plato to Hegel and Marx, and ultimately, to the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century. He decided to write The Open Society and Its Enemies when Nazi Germany annexed his native Austria in March 1938, and he continued his work in the shadow of World War II. Fascism and communism, he argued, were just the latest manifestations of what he described as the “perennial revolt against freedom and reason.” And he saw historicism as a powerful instigator of this revolt.
“When a society has discovered the natural law that determines its own movement,” Marx wrote, “even then it can neither overleap the natural phases of its evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by a stroke of the pen. But this much it can do; it can shorten and lessen its birth-pangs.” Historicism leads intellectuals and political leaders to perceive themselves as the midwives of historical progress, ushering in a predetermined future instead of using reason and compromise to develop institutions and policies that will improve general welfare. This reduces human beings to raw material—the fuel that propels the great machine of history toward its final destination. History has repeatedly shown that this is an extremely dangerous conceit.
Though he was no historicist, Popper had his own grand theory of historical evolution. He believed “we are still in the midst of the transition from the closed to the open society.” For Popper, the closed society is a world of tribalism, mysticism, and authoritarianism, while the open society elevates individual rights, reason, and democracy. Popper avoided teleology, but he said history could be interpreted from the “point of view of our fight for the open society.” Although he acknowledged that history “has no end nor meaning,” he believed “we can decide to give it both. We can make it our fight for the open society and against its antagonists.”
Despite his criticism of historicism, Popper still recognised the fact of historical progress. “The transition from the closed to the open society,” he wrote, “can be described as one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed.” He added: “Of course, this revolution was not made consciously.” An essential difference between historicism and Popper’s understanding of historical progress is that he didn’t posit any intelligible and immovable principles or laws. Unlike historicists such as Marx, Popper didn’t believe it was possible to discern “natural” historical laws and build policies or prophecies around them. He argued that history is contingent on many unforeseen developments, which have complex causes and unpredictable consequences.
For example, Popper attributed the breakdown of tribalism in Greece—a significant step toward an early version of the open society, Athenian democracy—to population growth. He argued that the expansion of international commerce was “perhaps the worst danger to the closed society,” as it spread new ideas that challenged the old order and sparked political revolutions. Imperialism played a role as well, as it brought revolutionary change to closed societies by force. Popper even argued that historical conditions over time have conspired to make a complete return to the closed society “impossible”—a claim that flirted with historicism, but was self-evidently true by the middle of the 20th century (and is even more true today). His hostility to historicism didn’t foreclose on the possibility of directionality in history.
After World War II, it looked as if history had set a course for the global triumph of the open society. The United States’ greatest enemies, Germany and Japan, became two of its closest allies. Institutions such as NATO and the EU brought Western democracies closer together than at any point in history. The postwar international order built by the United States and its allies was a profound success, leading to an unprecedented profusion of economic growth and political freedom. The world underwent a wave of democratisation after World War II, which accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While Russia struggled to make the transition to a market economy and failed to become an open society, many former Soviet states became fully integrated with the Western security, political, and economic architecture. East Asian states including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan followed.
But while these countries are testaments to the triumph of the open society, others have taken a different path. In 1981, nearly 92 percent of Chinese were living in extreme poverty. By 2018, the proportion was effectively zero, marking the most dramatic and rapid escape from privation in human history. China’s GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation and cost of living) is 45 times higher today than it was in 1980. But hopes that China’s economic renaissance would spur the development of liberalism and democracy were unrealised, and the country has instead moved toward totalitarianism—especially since Xi Jinping became president in 2013. Although China is now experiencing severe economic instability and demographic decline, the marriage of a totalitarian political system with economic prosperity is a powerful repudiation of the open society.
Meanwhile, democratic momentum around the world has stalled. According to a report recently published by the democracy monitor Freedom House, “Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023.” Countries classified as democracies can vary significantly in terms of the strength of their institutions and the rights granted to citizens. Hungary and Finland are both democracies, but the former has taken a clear turn toward illiberalism and autocracy under Viktor Orbán, whose ruling Fidesz party has undermined the independent judiciary, attacked press and academic freedom, and imposed restrictions on opposition parties. This is part of a global anti-democratic trend—after peaking around a decade and a half ago, the number of liberal democracies in the world has been falling.
Even the United States has undergone a period of political degeneration that has resulted in resurgent tribalism, evaporating institutional trust, and a turn away from democratic norms. Political polarisation in Congress and among the American public has been increasing for decades. According to Pew, just four percent of Americans believe their political system is working very or extremely well. Gallup has tracked average aggregate confidence in major American institutions (such as the Supreme Court, Congress, and the media) for nearly four and a half decades, and the proportion has been steadily declining—from 48 percent in 1979 to an all-time low of 26 percent in 2023. A 2024 survey found that over three-quarters of Americans believe their democracy is under threat, while ninety percent say it fails to represent the interests of most citizens.
“In his criticism of democracy, and in his story of the rise of the tyrant,” Popper wrote, “Plato raises implicitly the following question: What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead?” Popper took this “paradox of freedom” seriously, and he didn’t have any illusions about democracy. He recognised that some democratically elected rulers will be demagogic, incompetent, and even authoritarian. In fact, he believed that this outcome ought to be expected in a democracy. This is why he presented a “theory of democratic control” to address this concern: “The theory I have in mind is one which does not proceed, as it were, from a doctrine of the intrinsic goodness or righteousness of a majority rule, but rather from the baseness of tyranny; or more precisely, it rests upon the decision, or upon the adoption of the proposal, to avoid and to resist tyranny.” He continued:
This principle does not imply that we can ever develop institutions of this kind which are faultless or foolproof, or which ensure that the policies adopted by a democratic government will be right or good or wise—or even necessarily better or wiser than the policies adopted by a benevolent tyrant. … What may be said, however, to be implied in the adoption of the democratic principle is the conviction that the acceptance of even a bad policy in a democracy (as long as we can work for a peaceful change) is preferable to the submission to a tyranny, however wise or benevolent.
Popper argued that the first responsibility of a democratic system is avoiding bad outcomes—not engineering some prefabricated utopian future. Responsible leaders must confront the “greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.” According to Popper, the primary goal of democratic governments should be to “create, develop, and protect political institutions for the avoidance of tyranny.”
Popper argued that the “one really important thing about democracy” is the “restriction and balance of power.” He observed that democracy “provides an invaluable battleground for any reasonable reform, since it permits reform without violence.” Liberal democracy is a political “battleground” because it is explicitly unconcerned with ultimate ends—it doesn’t exist to lay the foundation for a utopian workers’ state, a racially pure nationalist ethnostate, or any other teleological fantasy. Nor does it exist to save citizens’ souls and shepherd them into some otherworldly utopia in the afterlife. Liberal democracy isn’t meant to give people’s lives meaning—it’s meant to create the conditions that allow diverse citizens to pursue lives of meaning as they see fit, as long as they don’t prevent others from doing so.
“Institutions are like fortresses,” Popper wrote. “They must be well designed and manned.” Democracy is always vulnerable because institutions are only as strong as the people who maintain them. And this maintenance doesn’t always come naturally, as leaders and citizens must set aside their tribal loyalties to respect impersonal rules and norms that privilege the health of democracy over their narrow parochial interests.
This is what Donald Trump failed to do when he refused to concede defeat in the 2020 election. Instead of accepting the outcome, he tried to disenfranchise voters in seven states with a scheme to send fraudulent electors to Washington. He pressured election officials who wouldn’t “find” him the votes he needed to win, even threatening some with imprisonment. He attempted to launch phoney election-fraud investigations, spent years claiming that the election was “rigged” and “stolen,” and embraced rioters who descended on the US Capitol in a violent effort to stop the certification of the election result and the peaceful transfer of power. “The defence of democracy,” Popper wrote, “must consist in making anti-democratic experiments too costly for those who try them.” American voters did the opposite by rewarding Trump with re-election in 2024.
One of Popper’s main criticisms of the radical Marxists of his day was that they intentionally made people “suspicious of democracy. ‘In reality the state is nothing more,’ says [Friedrich] Engels, ‘than a machine for the oppression of one class by another.’” Engels had an instrumental view of democracy—it’s just one step in the march toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. While Trump has completely different political objectives, he holds a similar view of democracy—it’s a tool to be used and discarded as circumstances require. Trump wants to make Americans suspicious of democracy as well, because this enables him to reject any democratic outcome he doesn’t like. He frequently complains that he was the target of a “deep state” conspiracy to frustrate his agenda when he was in office and keep him out of power when he wasn’t. He participated in the electoral process, but claimed that this process was corrupt and refused to accept any outcome other than victory. Faith in democratic institutions was already waning in the United States, and Trump made Americans even more cynical and distrustful.
Recall Popper’s comment about democracy functioning as a “battleground” for “reasonable reform.” He continued: “If the preservation of democracy is not made the first consideration in any particular battle fought out on this battle-ground, then the latent anti-democratic tendencies may bring about a breakdown of democracy.” Americans have not made the preservation of democracy their first consideration, and this puts the health of that democracy at risk.
In September 2024, Gallup asked American voters which issues mattered most to them. “Democracy in the U.S.” was second only to the economy, outranking immigration, healthcare, abortion, and many other major issues. However, voters viewed the issue through a partisan lens. In November, many voters who had spent years screaming about the compromised and corrupt American electoral system were suddenly satisfied that their votes had been fairly counted and a democratic outcome had been achieved. This is not a sustainable civic status quo—respect for the results of elections can’t be contingent on whether your preferred candidate wins.
Highly developed countries are always capable of reverting to the pathologies of the closed society given the right political, economic, and cultural conditions. Germany was among the most advanced and educated countries in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, and it still descended into Nazism. Of course, that doesn’t mean the United States is heading toward fascism. But history is full of sobering reminders that, no matter how consistent progress may seem, nothing is inevitable.
II.
Popper recognised that the transition from the closed to the open society wouldn’t be smooth. The reason there’s a “perennial revolt against freedom and reason”—a revolt against the open society—is that such a society causes what Popper described as “uneasiness” and “strain.” This is the “strain created by the effort … to be rational, to forgo at least some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, and to accept responsibilities.”
While the open society “sets free the critical powers of man,” it is also a society in which “individuals are confronted with personal decisions.” Citizens’ social roles aren’t determined for them—they must carve out a place in society and find their own sense of meaning, which can lead to powerful feelings of alienation and atomisation. Popper explained that these problems don’t exist in closed societies, which resemble “a herd or a tribe in being a semi-organic unit whose members are held together by semi-biological ties—kinship, living together, sharing common efforts, common dangers, common joys and common distress.”
The social tension in open societies is exacerbated by technological change and other aspects of modernity. In the late 19th century, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies expressed this tension in terms of a dichotomy between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Since Tönnies presented this dichotomy, forces such as globalisation, urbanisation, and secularisation have only hastened the transition to the open society. According to Popper, the strains of modernity are felt even more acutely in “times of social change.”
“The emancipation of the individual,” Popper wrote, was “the great spiritual revolution which had led to the breakdown of tribalism and to the rise of democracy.” But the breakdown of tribalism—the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft—is a major engine of social and political instability. Popper observed that opponents of the open society often call for a return to the “lost unity of tribalism.” In an open society, people still sort themselves into closed groups on the basis of shared values and cultural affinities. This can lead to various forms of essentialism and identity politics—like the idea that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation, or that natural-born citizens are “real Americans” while immigrants are not. Our tribes often take precedence over looser connections to fellow citizens, as the belief in abstract democratic values isn’t as strong as the bonds of tribal relationships. This is why pluralism is a significant challenge for open societies, even though it’s among the most important products of those societies.
There will always be demagogues who use the freedom of the open society to advocate for a return to the closed society, and this is particularly true during times of social and political upheaval. These demagogues recognise that they can smooth the path towards authoritarianism by inflaming tribal hatreds. Authoritarians are capable of seizing and consolidating power in a democracy by turning citizens against one another, which is why Trump maintains that the “enemy from within” poses a more dangerous threat than Russia or China. It’s also why he says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” When Trump’s political opponents challenge his anti-democratic behaviour, his supporters dismiss this as blind partisanship.
The liberal framework, which protects freedom of speech, conscience, and association, also creates the conditions for various forms of tribalism to thrive. In the United States, you’re free to be a humanist or a fundamentalist Christian. You’re free to call for open borders or mass deportations. You’re free to be a democratic socialist, communist, or fascist. This freedom—and the existence of liberal states and societies strong enough to accommodate it—is a revolutionary political achievement. In addition to describing the transition from the closed to the open society as “one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed,” Popper also described the escape from tribalism and authoritarianism as a “spiritual revolution” that could not be entirely reversed. This may not be historicism, but it’s an acknowledgment of the power of historical momentum, as well as the reality of moral and political progress.
Even amid a global democratic recession—and at a time when authoritarian states are increasingly confident and aggressive—the long-term prospects of open societies are brighter than those of their enemies. Unlike the various forms of historicism throughout history, this claim has significant and growing empirical support. In 1992, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, which expanded on a famous essay he published in the summer of 1989 (entitled “The End of History?”). Just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall set in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy had proven to be the most successful and sustainable form of government. In 1989, he cited a global wave of democratisation that had already taken place, and he couldn’t have known that the size and speed of this wave would accelerate dramatically.
There has been an alarming global shift away from democracy, but if you only read increasingly dire annual reports from concerned NGOs like Freedom House, you could miss the fact that the world is still in the middle of the greatest democratic renaissance in history. In 1945, over three-quarters of countries were closed autocracies, while just 8 percent could be classified as some kind of democracy. Today, nineteen percent are closed autocracies, while the majority are democracies. From 1989 to 2004, the proportion of democracies surged from less than thirty percent to nearly 54 percent. Fukuyama said the world would continue to democratise, and it did.
Many of Fukuyama’s most vehement critics have never read his work, and they assume the “end of history” meant the end of wars, political repression, economic crises, and so on. For three and a half decades, lazy political commentators have used Fukuyama as a go-to hook when they want to add a bit of intellectual heft to articles about some political crisis or conflict. Fukuyama has allegedly been proven wrong countless times during this period: on 11 September, during the Great Recession, when Trump was elected, when COVID-19 hit, when Trump was elected a second time. But Fukuyama never claimed that newspapers would suddenly have nothing bad to report—he used the word “end” in a different sense. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy had outperformed other systems, and that there were political and economic reasons why it would continue to do so. This remains a credible thesis today.
Matt Johnson
Fukuyama argues that the historical significance of liberal democracy rests on the “twin pillars of economics and recognition.” This isn’t just because liberal democracy has proven more capable than other systems of satisfying citizens’ material needs—it’s also because the satisfaction of those needs often leads to demands for greater political freedom. As Fukuyama put it, the “social changes that accompany advanced industrialization, in particular education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people.” This is why the desire for recognition is the “link between liberal economics and liberal politics.” The greatest challenge to this idea today is China, which has achieved remarkable material progress without a corresponding demand for political freedom. But it’s too early to render a verdict on what the Chinese people will ultimately want, especially as economic growth inevitably slows.
The End of History is a thoroughly Hegelian theory. Fukuyama described Hegel as “one of the constitutive philosophers of modernity” and the “philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time.” He believes Hegel identified a “mechanism” of historical development that was “incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist”—the “struggle for recognition.” This struggle has to do with the “moral side of man’s nature,” which goes beyond the desire for material comfort and security. It’s the aspect of human nature concerned with what Fukuyama calls thymos—a Greek word that can be translated as “spiritedness,” and which refers to feelings of self-worth, esteem, and motivation. According to Fukuyama, the struggle for recognition is the “root not only of the violence of the state of nature and of slavery,” but also the source of patriotism, solidarity, and other positive civic traits. While the desire for recognition can lead to pointless violence and tribalism, it also drives moral and political progress.
Popper didn’t share Fukuyama’s appreciation for Hegel, whom he attacked as the “father of modern historicism and totalitarianism.” He drew a straight line from Hegelian thought to communism and fascism, and he blamed Hegel for the fact that the “idea of fate or destiny has become a favourite obsession, as it were, of the revolt against freedom.” He said Hegel was a “mouthpiece of the reaction against the French Revolution” and a courtier philosopher who regarded the Prussian monarchy as the “highest peak” of freedom. Fukuyama argued that “Hegel saw in Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality.” Fukuyama’s interpretation is more accurate. While it is true that Hegel was sympathetic to the Prussian monarchy, he believed the French Revolution represented the concrete realisation of abstract ideas about human freedom—as well as a crucial step in the historical process.
Despite their contradictory analyses of Hegel, Fukuyama and Popper agreed that he is among the most influential figures in Western philosophy. As Fukuyama explained:
For better or worse, much of Hegel’s historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man.
This notion doesn’t sound so different from Popper’s argument that humanity has undergone a revolutionary and irreversible transformation from the closed to the open society. While Popper and Fukuyama have opposite interpretations of Hegel’s historicism, there is a fundamental alignment between their philosophies.
Popper was correct that historicism can lead to totalitarianism. Soviet leaders could rationalise any crime or failure by appealing to Marxist prophecy—every victory confirmed the prophecy, while every defeat could be blamed on sinister counter-revolutionary forces (which were inadvertently fulfilling the prophecy anyway). The Nazis could do the same with reference to Germany’s racial destiny. Historicism is particularly dangerous when it’s fused with utopianism—communists justified their atrocities by claiming they were building a glorious workers’ state, while an Islamic suicide bomber believes murdering civilians will earn him a ticket to paradise.
But there is nothing utopian about Fukuyama’s historicism. Despite the pervasive misconception that the End of History is a triumphalist theory, Fukuyama was “ambivalent” about his conclusion that liberal capitalist democracy would prove to be the apex of political development. “The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” He even wondered if the prospect of “boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
Fukuyama’s pessimism was prescient. Many citizens of Western democracies no longer appreciate the hard-won achievements of their open societies. Pew reports that just nineteen percent of Americans believe their democracy provides a “good example for other countries to follow.” Yet millions of people around the world are still desperate to live in the United States either legally or illegally, and millions more are inspired by the American example in their own societies. American despondency isn’t just an expression of anxiety—it expresses contempt for fellow Americans who are allegedly responsible for this state of decay.
American politics has become a toxic stew of tribal grievances, paranoia, and nihilism. Many Americans believe the government is run by a tyrannical deep state that unilaterally overrides the will of the people and manipulates the democratic process from the shadows. Many others believe their compatriots just returned a fascist to the Oval Office. There’s an epistemic crisis in the United States—social-media algorithms, low-information podcast hosts, and hyper-partisan media outlets feed hateful propaganda to cloistered political tribes. Rampant political dysfunction has become the norm—threats of a government shutdown or a default on the national debt (which would cause a global economic calamity) loom over routine government business like passing budgets. Partisanship in Congress is driven by partisanship in the population, and vice versa—a process that endlessly ratchets up mindless polarisation.
It’s one thing to blame an opposing political party or a particular administration for the deepest social and political problems a country faces. It’s quite another to blame democracy itself, which the citizens of Western democracies are increasingly doing. Popper argued that this would be a reckless misattribution of responsibility: “It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves, that is to say, the citizens of the democratic state.” He observed that the enemies of democracy throughout history, such as revolutionary Marxists, had a “policy of blaming democracy for all the evils which it does not prevent, instead of recognizing that the democrats are to be blamed, and the opposition usually no less than the majority.”
One reason Popper opposed historicism and other aspects of the closed society is that he believed citizens shouldn’t be relieved of the “supreme responsibility for our actions, and for their repercussions upon the course of history.” The next four years will be filled with bitter debates about mass deportations, trade wars, political persecutions, and the intensifying confrontations with Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the authoritarian world. But those fortunate enough to live in open societies must remember that the most important political battle is the one that makes all the others possible—the battle for democracy.
III.
There’s a disconnect between the derangement of our politics and the reality of life for most citizens of Western democracies. Today’s open societies are exceptionally wealthy and free by historical standards, but they are still afflicted by deepening discontent, intensifying political rancour, and collapsing institutional trust.
In a recent interview, Fukuyama wondered why there “seems to be this disjunction between populist anger and actual outcomes.” He observed that the “economic dislocations of the past” that spurred fascism, communism, and other great political upheavals were far more serious than anything the citizens of affluent Western democracies confront today. One reason for the perpetual dissatisfaction and nihilism in contemporary open societies is that material comfort and political stability aren’t enough to give people a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. This is a subject Fukuyama addressed in The End of History and the Last Man:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at the opinion polls in mature democracies like the United States, but peace and prosperity are exactly what democracy has delivered over the past eighty years. Great power conflict in Western Europe ended with World War II. It is now taken for granted that a war between, say, Germany and France is inconceivable, but this is among the greatest political achievements in the history of the continent. Despite the horrors of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed without a fight. Former Soviet states lined up to join the West, while Russia has only managed to maintain its sphere of influence with force and coercion.
Although the war in Ukraine is the largest conflict on European soil since World War II, Western powers have helped Kyiv defend itself from Russian aggression without deploying any NATO forces on the battlefield. China is a rapidly rising power, but the militaries of the United States and its European and East Asian allies are far more powerful. There is anxious talk of a “new authoritarian axis” comprising China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But NATO defence spending is three times higher than this axis, and it has surged since the invasion of Ukraine. NATO has also continued to expand with the recent accession of Finland and Sweden.
Democracies have created historically unprecedented economic prosperity. Marxists assumed that conditions for a growing majority of workers would inevitably get worse while a shrinking capitalist class would get richer and richer—a status quo that would eventually spark revolution. Instead, there has been vast wealth creation at all levels of society in democratic countries. While inequality remains a problem, this growing prosperity has been accompanied by drastic increases in public spending as a share of GDP across every major advanced democracy. “Marx investigated laissez-faire capitalism,” Popper wrote, “and he never dreamt of interventionism.” Popper used the word “interventionism” to describe public investments that have secured a higher standard of living for workers in democracies. Popper continued: “Democratic interventionism has made immense advances since Marx’s day. This shows that much has been achieved, and it should encourage us to believe that more can be done.”
Since Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867, global GDP (in inflation-adjusted dollars) has grown sixty-fold. Open societies are the main contributors to this explosion of economic productivity, and they also provide strong social safety nets. Democratic states created a system of global trade that has spurred economic liberalisation and growth in every region of the world. Protectionist demagogues like Trump have made opposition to free trade a core part of their political appeal, but the postwar era of globalisation led to the greatest rise in living standards the world has ever seen. In 1945, the value of exports as a share of global GDP was just four percent—a proportion that increased six-fold over the following seventy years, and which corresponded with the fastest period of wealth creation in human history.
While 38 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 1990, this proportion has collapsed to an all-time low of 8.6 percent. World population increased by more than 2.75 billion over the same period, which means billions of people have escaped extreme poverty in just 35 years. In 1950, global life expectancy was around 46 years. Now it’s over 73 years. Around 36 percent of the world was literate 75 years ago, but this proportion has risen to over 87 percent. Of course, these massive improvements in human well-being haven’t been confined to open societies. But they’re largely products of those societies, from the economic liberalisation that enabled the elimination of extreme poverty in China to the defeat of the Soviet Union—an economically backward authoritarian superstate that suppressed the political ambitions and stultified the creative potential of hundreds of millions of people for nearly half a century.
The Chinese model is the only real ideological rival to liberal democracy, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so successful if Deng Xiaoping hadn’t partially adopted the economic freedom long championed by the West. While China has proven to be a remarkably stable totalitarian power, it remains to be seen whether this stability will survive amid slowing economic growth, a looming demographic crisis, and the growing likelihood of military aggression in Taiwan.
Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. He wrote the book during one of the most devastating conflicts in human history and before the dramatic achievements of the postwar democratic world. Every argument he made about the advantages of open societies became even stronger in the decades after the book was published. Open societies haven’t just proven to be more prosperous and free than their authoritarian enemies—they have also been far more resilient. At a time when the citizens of liberal democracies are increasingly cynical and disillusioned about their societies, this larger historical perspective is needed.
Popper was right that historicism is a dangerous and distorting worldview. Human affairs aren’t governed by unbreakable laws, and no philosopher has the gift of prophecy. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t intelligible forces at work in history. Nor does it foreclose on the possibility of making informed predictions about the future and considering which institutions will be capable of building that future. In an essay published a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Popper wrote:
Anybody who has ever lived under another form of government—that is, under a dictatorship which cannot be removed without bloodshed—will know that a democracy, imperfect though it is, is worth fighting for and, I believe, worth dying for.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper frequently celebrated democracy for what it doesn’t do. Democracy doesn’t concentrate power in the hands of a single fallible Great Man; it doesn’t create an atmosphere of fear in which government officials care more about appeasing the ruler than serving the public; it doesn’t suppress the rights and autonomy of individual citizens. But Popper also understood that democracy is an end in itself. He didn’t have some bloodless technocratic view of democracy as merely the most practical way to manage a society—he recognised that it is the only system capable of protecting freedom for millions of citizens and enabling them to pursue self-determined lives of meaning.
Equal consideration and rights in a democracy aren’t granted on the basis of race, religion, or some other tribal marker—they are granted on the basis of common citizenship. This universal recognition is at the heart of Fukuyama’s thesis—liberal democracies have outlived their rivals because they provide dignity and autonomy to all their citizens. Unlike the absolutist political systems of closed societies, liberal democracy recognises citizens as moral agents capable of rational choice—and deserving of robust individual rights—which satisfies the desire for recognition more completely than any other system. Universal recognition is also the central element of Popper’s open society—the most fundamental aspect of the transition from closed to open societies is the construction of institutions that secure democracy, pluralism, and individual freedom.
Fukuyama and Popper are both keenly aware of what the latter described as the “perennial revolt against freedom and reason.” Identity politics, deepening political polarisation, and other forms of tribalism in modern liberal democracies are all symptoms of what Fukuyama called “struggle for the sake of struggle.” The citizens of open societies have the luxury to struggle for the sake of struggle because they live in free, wealthy, and law-bound countries. These citizens can believe and say whatever they want about the sinister machinations of the authoritarian “deep state” without wondering whether its agents will show up at their door. They can loudly condemn their own democracy before confidently casting their votes in free and fair elections every couple of years. They can enjoy the freedom of living in a pluralistic society while insisting that anyone who doesn’t worship their God or support their party isn’t a real citizen.
But it’s time for the defenders of the open society—those citizens who recognise that the protection of democracy itself will always be the most important political project—to find their voice. There’s no law of the universe that says democracy must survive, but it has survived this long because there have always been citizens willing to defend it when the time came. Many of these citizens faced far greater threats than we face today. Popper said democracy is worth dying for, and many have died for it. There will always be reactionaries who argue that nobody is willing to die for something as abstract as democracy—that they’ll sacrifice themselves for a nation, but not for an idea. But American soldiers don’t take an oath to a landmass with defined borders called the United States of America. They don’t take an oath to the people who check the same boxes on the census as them or vote the same way they do. They take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
The defenders of the open society won’t shake the cynicism and complacency of their fellow citizens if they don’t figure out how to make a more inspiring case for democracy. The era of democracy has to culminate in something more than the “endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands,” as Fukuyama drearily put it. If democracy is really worth dying for, we have to explain why.
It may seem like the main threats to the open society today are authoritarian foes like Russia and China, but a much greater threat is the crisis of confidence in democratic institutions. The leaders in Moscow and Beijing may purport to offer an alternative to liberal democracy, but we aren’t in the middle of an ideological Cold War. Vladimir Putin has imperial ambitions, but he’s well aware that his decaying petro-autocracy isn’t some bold new political idea that could take root elsewhere. Xi Jinping is a nationalist who believes China deserves to be a great power, but China’s unique blend of totalitarianism and economic growth can’t be replicated. Third-rate dictatorships like Venezuela or North Korea don’t even pretend to care about anything beyond personal power and corruption, while the ideology of antique theocracies like Iran will never win a mass following around the world.
Although The Open Society and Its Enemies is a powerful indictment of historicism, we no longer live in an era dominated by historicist fantasies like Marxism. We live in an era of political nihilism—an era in which the gravest threat to democracy isn’t a rival ideology like communism; it’s the collapsing faith in democracy among citizens of open societies. As Fukuyama explained, the success of liberal democracy isn’t just material—it’s in the “realm of consciousness or ideas.” This is the battlefield for the open society today, and it’s why Popper’s most important contribution goes beyond his attack on historicism.
Popper believed the transition from the closed to the open society is the one political revolution that really matters, and he understood that this transition is still underway. He traced the development of the open society—as well as the perennial revolt against freedom and reason—from Athenian democracy to the modern democracies that confronted the great totalitarian assault in the 20th century. This isn’t historicism, but it is history with a powerful sense of direction. Popper may not have agreed with Fukuyama’s thesis—and he certainly would have rejected any Hegelian ideas about historical inevitability—but he made the same argument in a different way.
The defenders of the open society don’t need historicist fantasies. They don’t need to dream about the day one class or race or nation will hold the power to dominate all others. They don’t need to promulgate iron laws of historical development, nor must they labour under delusions about their ability to see the future. They just need to understand why liberal democracy has outlasted its enemies. While democracy may not offer grandiose utopian promises or the intoxication of tribalism, it gives diverse human beings the freedom to build the lives they want. No other system has ever been capable of affording so much freedom to so many people. If the citizens of liberal democracies rediscover the extent of this historical revolution, perhaps their faith in the open society will be restored.
