The Open Society and Its Complexities

by Gerald F. Gaus

A mere two decades ago it was widely assumed that liberal democracy and the Open Society it created had decisively won their century-long struggle against authoritarianism. Although subsequent events have shocked many, F.A. Hayek would not have been surprised that we are in many ways disoriented by the society we have created. As he understood it, the Open Society was a precarious achievement in many ways at odds with our deepest moral sentiments. His path-breaking analyses argued that the Open Society runs against our evolved attraction to "tribalism" that the Open Society is too complex for moral justification; and that its self-organized complexity defies attempts at democratic governance.

In his final, wide-ranging book, Gerald Gaus critically reexamines Hayek's analyses. Drawing on diverse work in social and moral science, Gaus argues that Hayek's program was manifestly prescient and strikingly sophisticated, always identifying real and pressing problems. Yet, Gaus maintains, Hayek underestimated the resources of human morality and the Open Society to cope with the challenges he perceived. Gaus marshals formal models and empirical evidence to show that our Open Society is grounded on moral foundations of human cooperation originating in our distant evolutionary past, but has built upon them a complex and diverse society that requires us to rethink both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance. In these fearful, angry and inwardly-looking times, when political philosophy has itself become a hostile exchange between ideological camps, The Open Society and Its Complexities shows how moral and ideological diversity, so far from being
the enemy of a free and open society, can be its foundation.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

304 pages, Hardcover

Published August 20, 2021

About the author

Gaus was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and earned his MA and PhD in political science at the University of Pittsburgh. His career included fellowships at The Australian National University and professorships at Wake Forest University, the University of Queensland, the University of Minnesota, Tulane University, and since 2006, the University of Arizona, where he was the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy. At Arizona, he was also head of the interdisciplinary Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.

Reviews

[Victor Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The vague title and modest framing of this book as a commentary on Hayek drastically undersell its ambition. It synthesizes a vast range of material from evolutionary anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political science, and economics to make a cautiously optimistic argument about the capacity of humans to handle the challenges of modernity. Gaus has taken pioneering steps towards the integration of complex systems theory into contemporary political theory—a contribution which I think will be among the most important legacies of his impressive corpus of work.

[Paul Sand · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

The author, Gerald Gaus, died shortly after completing this book. It was nominated for last year's Hayek Book Prize by the Manhattan Institute.

I picked it via Interlibrary Loan, which was unfortunate. If I'd browsed through it off a library shelf, I probably would have quietly put it back. It's very complex and dense, and I had to go into "look at every page" mode for long stretches. There's even math (page 219):

xi = xi-1 + 1 ± (p × yi-1) ± (q × Zi-1)

I don't know how well that will translate on Goodreads. But in any case, that tells you the intended audience for the book: those who can look at that and say "Ah, of course." (I can almost tell what's going on: it's intended to model the evolution of a social policy that has a number of "targets", which are influenced by each other and a couple other independent parameters.)

So what did I understand?

Gaus's goal here is to update the concept of the "Open Society" as described by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. (Hayek usually called it the "Great Society".) In the decades since that framework was promulgated, there have been immense strides in anthropology, evolution (biological and cultural), economics, and game theory. How does (especially) Hayek hold up?

It's a mixed bag. Hayek was pessimistic; he speculated that the ethos of small-tribe hunter-gatherer societies was more or less hard-wired into our brains, and those egalitarian biases could well flummox any effort to establish a classical-liberal order for the long term. Gaus objects that before those small tribes developed, we were more like our closest primate kinfolk: chimps and bonobos. And those species aren't egalitarian at all. So there's every reason to suppose that we aren't hardwired egalitarians.

Gaus goes on to examine how social morality and cooperation can evolve, given the (actually) unchanging bits of human nature, diversity of attitudes, values, and talents, and changing environments and resources. Lots of game theory here. Basically, Gaus winds up agreeing with Hayek's belief that "grand plans" for human society were misguided; instead, society can and should evolve on its own, self-organizing. Probably painfully, but necessarily so. "Governors" at every level of society can help by measured, small-scale fixes. But much remains outside their power. Gaus is pretty optimistic about the long-term prospects for the Open Society.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a liminal book. It is liminal because it deals with the cutting edge of philosophy and science, and thus cuts to the heart of the Deep Unknown that surrounds our human civilization. It hugs the limits of our knowledge. At the same time, it is liminal for a second, more tragic reason; it was published after the untimely death of its author, Jerry Gaus, one of the leading political and moral philosophers of our time. The book feels like a culmination of a lifetime of thinking about thinking. It is a stepping stone for a whole generation of young, complexity-aware philosophers to enter the fray and make their mark in the existential struggle for professional renown and intellectual revolution.

The Open Society and its Complexities engages in the Hayekian project of epistemic liberalism as a way to conceptualize, deal with, and govern the complex adaptive social order. However, Gaus takes on a dialectical attitude toward Hayek, at times praising him, at other times criticizing him. The book is neatly separated into three main sections: Part 1 seeks to repudiate, or at least moderate, Hayek's conservative claim that human beings are ill-adapted to living in the Open Society. With the help of recent anthropological, psychological, and economic studies, Gaus convincingly shows that human beings have resources available for thriving under diversity and liberalism. Part 2, on the other hand, shows that the liberal Open Society can and should be morally justifiable to a diverse, restless, and ever-changing citizenry, EVEN IF we relax the heroic, complexity-insensitive assumptions of classic social contract theory and Rawlsian public reason liberalism. And finally, Part 3 tackles the governance challenges of the Open Society in the light of complexity theory. This narrative is mostly skeptical and negative in nature, since Gaus not only rejects the Utopian dreams of socialist and libertarian reformers, but also more modest hopes for stable national growth and development. In the end, he nonetheless offers a modicum of hope for effective governance and prediction in the form of diverse, multi-level, and polycentric governance arrangements. Although the Gaussian picture strikingly excludes national planning and almost all Platonic, Hobbesian, and Rawlsian normative political philosophy, it points to narrow problem arenas, policy sectors, and national sub-systems that may be suitable for at least short-to-medium-run control.

In the end, Gaus's book has three main virtues: 1) It represents the culmination of his multi-decade research program that combines the best parts of the late Rawlsian and the late Hayekian research programs. Although these two strands are often kept separate, putting them together represents, in my view, perhaps the most promising equilibrium for political and moral philosophy today. This kind of an epistemically enriched framework of public justification, whatever its flaws (and I have many qualms with it), raises all the right questions about what is feasible and desirable in a diverse, dynamically changing world. It forces philosophers to boost their complexity-awareness! 2) It summarizes, beyond Gaus's own work, massive sways of natural and social scientific research, and points to a powerful synthesis that represents "PPE" (Philosophy, politics, and economics) at its best. Although sometimes his literature reviews, which are aplenty in this book, do not add anything to the existing studies, they serve as powerful summaries of their key insights. He shows how a lot of the literature from cultural evolution, behavioural psychology, and political science are pointing a similar direction: complexity matters, diversity matters (and can be harnessed for solving social problems), experimentation matters (and should be developed into an active institutional platform), and public justification matters (and should be extended to a realistic framework that assumes only minimal convergence). 3) And finally, Gaus's project raises a deep sceptical challenge that needs to be taken seriously by any philosophers and scientists working today. In many ways, Gaus is simply collating and extrapolating on the insights of complexity theory and seeing where they lead in the realm of moral and political theory. The Gaussian sceptical challenge has, in my view, two prongs: scepticism towards the capacity of effective governance and scepticism towards the possibility of public moral convergence. Although interrelated, these are ultimatewly different challenges raised by the complexity theory framework. (We COULD imagine a world where effective governance was possible but moral convergence was impossible, or vice versa, but a world where BOTH convergences are in serious doubt is, indeed, very destabilizing!) Although I think that Gaus ultimately overstates the sceptical challenge on both accounts, the rigour of his logical analysis is unparalleled and his readers should not scoff at the implausible conclusion. I believe that more harm is done by ignoring the epistemic uncertainties of complexity than by overstating them; and to that extent Gaus is doing the social sciences a great service.

Gaus was a highly prolific man. I was lucky enough to meet him before he died and received great feedback from him for one of my working papers. He pressed me on a key theoretical question in governing complexity, namely, how decomposable/modular are rule changes? Can we really hope to make an isolated change in one part of the system ("Change A") and expect the rest of the interconnected system not to respond in diverse surprising and non-linear ways to it? Do not the tricky facts of human reflexivity, system interdependence, and the possibility of non-linear cascades undermine even the most well-informed attempts at institutional reform? I did not have good answers then, and I still struggle with the question today, although I believe I could give a better response today. He was ahead of us in many ways. Nonetheless, I think that philosophers today should move beyond Gaus. He has driven political philosophy to a new glorious dawn, but the new dawn looks more and more like a new standstill that offers nothing but "via negativa." However, developing an alternative positive liberal program that embraces the courage to partake in progressive or Utopian theorizing require passing through Gaus. All of us need to take his sceptical arguments seriously. We cannot afford to ignore him. He stands as the final test that we need to overcome in order to reinvent liberal hope. Gaus is the harsh crucible of the new dawn.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The focus of this multifaceted text is how the Open Society - a free, individualistic, diverse, dynamic society - can work given human nature and the complexity of the Open Society. It is organized as an investigation of what the author Gerald Gaus calls Friedrich Hayek's three unsettling theses: 1) That human nature has a tribal and parochial egalitarian basis which fundamentally is in conflict with the Open Society, and must be kept in check by it. 2) The Open Society is too complex to be amenable to justification, i.e. rational analysis and criticism. 3) The complexity of the Open Society is such that conscious human control and governance is impossible. At most, the state can provide the framework for the openness of the Open Society. Basically, the project that Gaus embarks on is to make a more optimistic case for the Open Society by critically discussing, and to some extent refuting Hayek's theses.

Gaus' argument concerning Hayek's first thesis takes into account the advances in understanding of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens that has taken place during the last 30 or so years. He notes that the idea that morality has sprung out of the needs of the hypersocial human animal during its evolution has become commonplace. In Gaus' view, political philosophy must now be discussed with explicit reference to human nature as nowadays understood in an evolutionary context. This includes the fact that humans are a fundamentally cultural species, which has many important ramifications. Gaus argues that human sociality is based on cooperation and that there are strong forces in it that drive towards inclusion, impartiality and self-organization which Hayek did not take into account, and which undermine Hayek's first thesis that human nature is at odds with the Open Society.

Gaus' argument on the second and third of Hayek's theses uses a range of arguments from different fields. It is a complex text, which is hard to summarize. It has many interesting threads, and requires much thinking on the part of the reader. The upshot is that Hayek did have many valid points, but that there is actually considerable space for both critical evaluation of society, and for attempts at reforming it consciously.

Although Gaus uses the term Open Society, which Karl Popper made famous, his account is almost wholly based on Hayek's evolutionary view of a free society - what Hayek called the Great Society. Although he refers to Popper in some passages, he is clear that he considers Hayek's analysis superior to Popper's. But, somewhat strangely, Gaus ends up in a position which is more similar to Popper's; he does not use the term, but he views social engineering - which Popper argued for - in a more positive light than Hayek. Now, it is clear that Popper did not flesh out his analysis of the Open Society very much; Gaus does a lot more work in this regard. But still, some discussion about the fact that Gaus' position ends up closer to Popper than to Hayek would have been useful.

The text is dense, and it draws on arguments from a broad range of scientific fields, such as anthropoly, primatology, psychology, cultural studies of various kinds, economics, game theory and complexity theory. This makes the book rather hard to read, even though the language in itself is not that difficult. There is just so much in it! Some issues are investigated through formalized analysis, which occasionally provides more clarity, in others not. This book cannot be recommended to the average politically interested person. Someone else needs to write a popular version of Gaus' account.

In these days, when the Open Society is threatened from many directions, it is somewhat startling to read the end of Gaus' text, where he is confident about the future: "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." It should be noted that Popper did not take this for granted at all. One may hope that Gaus' optimistic conclusion will turn out to be well-founded.

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

That governance cannot be a grand project in social planning does not imply that a complex society cannot be governed.
Effective governance requires widely justified norms and polices. Here, Hayek was deeply mistaken: without justification, the Open Society could not self-organize.

In conjunction with social forces, democratic governance can render the Open Society more resilient, help solve myriad strategic dilemmas, and improve the lives of its citizens in ways that are as important as they appear modest. Yet much remains outside the ambit of governance and must be left to the self-organizing forces that drive the Open Society. To ignore these limits can only bring democratic governance into disrepute: promising a new social order, it delivers only disappointment, cynicism, and populism.

Given the autocatalytic nature of the Open Society, it 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.

[Cyril Hédoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaus was an original thinker, mixing abstract and advanced philosophical reflections with an intense use of the tools, models and results of social sciences. This book - his last - illustrates perfectly the Gausian way of doing political and social philosophy. The thesis advanced in the book can be usefully described as a combination of post-Rawlsian liberalism with a neo-Hayekian account of society as a complex moral system. Gaus develops a model, the open society model, showing under which conditions moral justification and political governance are possible in societies opened to a wide array of perspectives and moral views. The result is a thoroughly argued defense of a form of liberal democracy pursuing local improvements rather than an elusive quest for an ideal. This is just the most important work of political philosophy over the recent period.