Open Society in Theory and Practice

From June 28 until July 4, 1972, a group of scholars, all of them acade- micians committed to the critical study of man and society which may be called political theory, met at The Rockefeller Foundation's VillaSerbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, to present papers on and discuss the subject of 'The Open Society. ' These papers, as revised, are published here, most of them for the first time. They reflect no consensus of view, nor were they intended to do so. That such a consensus did not emerge from the conference is not in our judgment a cause for regret; it may rather be regarded as a manifestation of a healthy and desirable plurality of approaches which itself indirectly tells us something important about the nature of the open society. All the papers deal in different contexts and from a variety of philosophi- cal and theoretical perspectives with the interrelated themes of openness and the open society. Some of the panelists are skeptical of the capacity of modern industrial, or 'post-industrial,' society, with its heavy emphasis upon technological rationality to foster authentic openness under currently prevailing assumptions about man and nature.