Gaus, Gerald, The Open Society and Its Complexities, Oxford University Press, 2021.
By Nick Cowen
The modal academic philosopher will gladly debate the notion that they do not know they have hands or that the table in front of them does not exist, while having absolute confidence that anyone defending a Republican president, or a Conservative government, is an egregious moral incompetent. Why does scholarly scepticism flee on political issues with certainty in its place?
Before I read The Open Society and Its Complexities (Gaus 2021), I was tempted to describe this attitude as ‘tribal’, a reflection that beliefs that distinguish ‘our’ coalition from competing ones are going to be held with an emotional force and loyalty absent from more mundane epistemological or metaphysical controversies. While it could be otherwise, most philosophers fall on the left coalition in Westen academia and so signal their fidelity to their political allies.
As Gerald Gaus shows in what has tragically turned out to be one of his final works such capricious labelling misunderstands the care required and complexity of real tribal governance. Small-scale communities thrive or perish based on their capacity to foster cooperation and inclusion while discouraging cheating. To be successful, governance mechanisms need to discern infractions, establish community consensus on wrongs, and apply graduated sanctions that allow deviant actors to be reintegrated. A false or exaggerated allegation can prove costly for the social standing of the accuser as it is a threat to the integrity of the group. Critically, realistic small-scale governance is not centrally about agreement and organic pursuit of common goals but rather reconciling conflicts of interest and aligning individual behavior with the group’s shared interests that overlap without ever being perfectly united.
By contrast, castigating a peer for wrongthink via social media is typically low-risk for accusers even if the occasional aggregate effect of a ‘pile-on’ for the accused can be costly. For Gaus, far from tribalism, acrimonious disputes between academics over distant but hot-button political issues are a product of an individualistic moralism where personal intuitions trump the search for community consensus and mutual co-operation. While Gaus is not a fan of this attitude towards morality, he recognises this expressive individualism to be one of the open society’s inevitable complexities.
This reflects how unique Gaus’s research program is within political philosophy precisely because it examines the possibility of social cooperation amid fundamental moral disagreement. This necessarily involves adopting a critical distance from specific moralities in contrast to the sort of judgements more often made in applied moral philosophy. At the object-level, Gaus is often in agreement with his peers on the left, whether on criticising the tyrannical tactics of Donald Trump or the need to enhance gender equality. At the meta-level, however, he recognises these shared commitments are neither the result of logical reflection nor particularly credible signals of personal enlightenment. Rather, both the content of and attitude towards morality is more likely the result of repeated attempts at practical social cooperation that have eventually become intuitive, especially to those who benefit from them in their everyday experience.
During his lifetime, Gaus’s detached approach occasionally rubbed some of his more partisan interlocutors the wrong way. His cool attitude to assessing morality as an admirable but pragmatic mechanism has more in common with an anthropologist than an ethicist. This reflects his pivotal role in the re-founding of ‘moral science’ as an explicit form of social inquiry and his championing of philosophy, politics, and economics as a way of injecting empirical and strategic insights into traditional philosophical debates.
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The Open Society and Its Complexities is a critical contribution to moral science. The open society in Karl Popper’s (1945) terminology, or what F.A. Hayek (1973) called the great society, is a large-scale community characterised by cooperative relations between strangers governed by widespread adherence to impersonal rules. They constrain, but do not determine, human action thus permit a large degree of individual and associational autonomy. Property rights and general prohibitions (as opposed to permissions, commands and duties) are paradigmatic of these impersonal rules.
Gaus attempts to address three unsettling and pessimistic theses drawn from Hayek’s work and particularly from Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973). Hayek fears the open or great society is:
- Beyond human nature
- Beyond human justification
- Beyond human control
The book’s three parts address these theses in turn by combining Gaus’s philosophical insights and some formal modelling with his reading of the contemporary empirical and conceptual understanding of human cooperation.
The first thesis is the contention that there is a mismatch between humanity’s evolved sense of morality, a commitment egalitarian sharing of resources between kin and comrades, and the inevitable presence of inequality in market societies. Gaus draws on a careful study of contemporary insights from evolutionary psychology and anthropology to explore this concern. Provocatively, Gaus’s conjectural history acknowledges insights from both Rousseau and Hayek, thinkers normally considered in almost Manichean opposition.
Human nature is not a singular type but a history. Non-human primates, our closest evolutionary relatives, have despotic institutions: a powerful male leads a small band or family through fear and violence (Bonobos are an interesting variation where hierarchy is pervasive, but females are either dominant or, at least, codominant within groups). Humans are distinctive in having instead evolved and maintained over many tens of thousands of years institutions of relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands characterised by resource sharing, resistance to arbitrary authority, and subjection of the physically powerful and adept to communal norms. Inequality, and especially extreme patriarchy, re-emerges with the rise of agriculture, clans, and the ancient despotic states. The open society is in fact, a resurgence and, in some ways, radicalisation of egalitarian commitments of pre-settled epoch but characterised this time by the rise of the modern state bound by the rule of law and the pervasion of what psychologist Joseph Henrich (2020) labelled WEIRD (short for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) morality. This is where Gaus’s historical account produces a decisive break with Hayek. The egalitarian moral package evolved during humanity’s ‘tribal’ experience furnishes the very kernel of what makes Hayek’s great society possible.
Gaus’s overarching point is that human nature is ambivalent. Both human biology and culture bare marks from these epochs. Within us are strong egalitarian sentiments yet also desires to dominate through physical force and manipulation, as well as equivalent capacities for acquiescence and subjection to power. At brief moments, Gaus whispers that the kernel of classical liberal notions can be found in our deep moral history: commitments to autonomy and cooperation combined with resistance both to repressive communal norms and the tyranny of ‘big man’ leaders. But then he retreats: human nature is ultimately too complex to summarise as one contemporary political ideology. The one thing human nature is not is anti-social or atomistic. We are a deeply communal species oriented towards morality and political life. Contra Hayek’s fears that egalitarian morality threatens the market order, Gaus claims that it is its creator.
The second thesis is about political obligation: how can an open society, reliant on evolved general rules whose overall structure is unknown to its followers and with results that frequently depart from common-sense morality, command legitimacy? It is noteworthy that Hayek virtually abandoned any hope of such justification leaving a substantial normative gap in his social theory, and so this seems to be the most challenging task of the book. I am unconvinced that Gaus locates a compelling justification either, but he supplies some key resources about how such a justification might be sought. He shows open societies could remain remarkably stable despite deep moral disagreement.
Gaus begins this task indirectly by contrasting the open society with another kind of liberal society envisaged by Mill. Mill endorses many of the same policies as proponents of the open society: toleration, freedom of thought and speech, voluntary association, privacy and, on more contingent grounds, free trade, and economic liberties. However, Mill endorses these with a teleological intention: to discover progressively the best way for people, both individually and collectively, to live. The presumption is that there is a common good life for human beings out there to be discovered and liberal institutions are the way to find it. Married to this presumption is the notion that all human beliefs, institutions and norms can be subject to rational interrogation and progressive improvement.
Gaus characterises this approach as a form of naïve naturalism: the belief that there is a stable answer to human flourishing out there. Instead, the open society is reflexive. It constantly produces new patterns of belief and behavior as adaptations and responses to the behaviour of others. We are in a never-ending experiment in living because the results and information from other people’s experiments constantly throw up novel environments that, in turn, provoke ideas for new experiments and moral living. The last generation’s actions to fix previous problems will produce completely fresh problems, challenges, and opportunities. The result is a constant differentiation and recombination of personal lifestyles and practices. Gaus draws a parallel between this moral and lifestyle diversity and the incredible diversity of products, services, and occupational roles that the division of labour produces in an extensive market (cf. Koppl et al. 2023). This combination of socio-economic specialisation and diversity implies a greater degree of interconnectedness. The more complex society involves ever greater personal reliance on contributions we do not understand and from people we will never personally know.
This regime of ever-increasing interconnectedness and rapid change seems to imply fragility. We are constantly confronted with new technologies and unanticipated changes in social practices. We cannot predict individual or systematic reactions to these novelties. Minor changes to one element of the social system can reverberate throughout, bringing with them the risk of chaos and social collapse. What countervailing forces could keep such a regime stable and functional?
Gaus considers Hayek’s answer: group selection. Hayek believes that only societies that select rules facilitating cooperative stability can survive in the long-run. But Gaus find this unconvincing for explaining the resilience of modern societies because, unlike smaller tribal communities, they typically do not face immediate deadly rivalry from other groups nor chronic resource scarcities. Societies with rules that deviate substantially from cooperative stability can persist without facing strong selection pressure. Gaus also criticises approaches drawn from the social contract tradition. One is what he calls algorithmic justice (his way of characterising fixed constitutional rules) because social complexity will inevitably generate unforeseen outcomes from any given set of rules. These are unlikely to be morally justified to the whole community. This relates to Nozick’s observation that liberty upsets patterns with the additional recognition that a pure procedural sense of justice is unlikely to be acceptable to many members of the public. The deliberative model, supported in Gaus’s (2012) previous work The Order of Public Reason, also has shortcomings when faced with the open society. Deliberation amid diversity may produce no eligible moral framework agreeable to all members of the public or, less likely, too many possible frameworks without a way of choosing non-arbitrarily between them.
The answer in this book, what Gaus calls a self-organisation model, is to use part of the evolved egalitarian moral package to alter some of the assumptions of the previous deliberative model. For many members of an open society, the attractiveness of a particular rule depends not on its content but on how widely supported it is. Many people recognise the function of morality as coordination. Through an iterated process of negotiation, these members learn what rules are more popular and adjust their preferences in future rounds accordingly and ultimately generate convergence not on an ‘optimal’ framework but a workable one. The key ingredient of this workable framework is tolerance which means quite minimally not holding individuals responsible for breaking personal rules that are based on a moral framework that they do not agree with (e.g. you do not blame a Catholic for not making hajj even if you consider making hajj a religious obligation). Property rights that facilitate the enforcement of different norms in specific contexts are critical for permitting this basic form of social tolerance.
A fascinating and counter-intuitive interpretation of Gaus’s model is that political communities characterised by greater diversity might be more stable and peaceful than those that are more homogenous. Sheer cultural distance can make practices that would appear abhorrent taken on the same terms within a shared moral framework instead appear simply exotic when situated within a radically different justificatory framework. The open society is characterised by people acting not just on different moralities but on fundamentally different grounds for moral action.
An example of this in practice might be found in the negative public reaction in some circles to the revelation of former Vice President Mike Pence’s personal practice of refusing to have private one-to-one lunches with women in his team or professional circle. Many people in the United States voluntarily adhere to rules around gender segregation but because Pence’s background is common in U.S. culture (Conservative, white and Christian), it is easier for adjacent outsiders to interrogate, criticise and even mock it. Pence’s moral stance not just against adultery and fornication, but against many situations that might conceivably lead to temptations to commit adultery diverges from average American norms but because he is part of a broadly shared culture, his rationale is more intelligible, and thus potentially more threatening. By contrast, norms of gender segregation within orthodox Jewish or observant Muslim communities are less likely to be publicly interrogated because they are part of a minority that is recognised as deeply different from mainstream U.S. culture. Totally different lifestyle commitments can paradoxically create less conflict. The question that radical difference prompts among members of the public is not ‘are they right?’ but rather ‘will they cooperate peacefully?’
The third thesis is about whether this account of the open society as a self-organising moral framework is compatible with self-government. Can one even make informed public policy amid complexity? Here, Gaus comes closest to defending the framers of this debate, Hayek and Popper. The answer is ‘yes’ with the understanding that a central government is a reflexive actor within a broader network: responsive to the dynamically changing motivations and resources of others. He contrasts this approach, the Process Theory of Self-Governance, with what he calls the Legislative Theory of Self-governance that insists that social relations are ultimately subject to statutory law and are enforced through the threat of punishment. Although this is Gaus’s terminology, this assumption of legal centralism is common in political and legal philosophy. In favour of his alternative approach, Gaus notes recent evidence that formal law is rarely enforced unless it is congruent with pre-existing social norms.
Gaus attempts to map out the space of possible self-governance. He notes that the direct pursuit of specific goals will be challenging for a government since there will inevitably be a large segment of any population that does not share those goals and there is a limit to the extent they can be threatened or incentivised to conform. Moreover, the pursuit of specific goals is fraught with complexity, dynamic responses and unintended consequences. Gaus details the difficulty of establishing firm evidence for the results of any policy, even plausibly simple ones such as automobile safety regulation, something that the ‘what works’ movement for evidence-based policy has grappled with for more than fifty years with only limited success (cf. Cowen et al. 2017). On the other hand, a government may have greater scope to solve strategic dilemmas (generated by familiar public goods, common pool resource and club good problems). In those cases, the actors involved can typically recognise the problem and often attempt to coordinate spontaneously to resolve it, yet absent coercive authority face the challenge of free riding. Government policy to assure already willing cooperators that defectors will be penalised are more likely to work since they follow the grooves of existing practices while commanding greater legitimacy.
Gaus concludes that a central government has an important ‘macro’ role in facilitating self-governance experiments at the micro and meso-levels of society and preventing communities from getting locked-in to particularly bad practices. Yet the most successful self-governance emerges not from grand philosophical schemes but from the careful, piecemeal reform of specific communities and sectors driven by the actors most impacted by them. A state can support an environment where experiments in self-governance is possible and where successful ones are allowed to spread but cannot institute them itself.
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What are the limitations of Gaus’s argument? Mario Rizzo (2025) characterises liberalism as a ‘philosophy of indirection’. Liberalism often portrays a disconnect between explicit intention and outcomes. For example, the deliberate pursuit of happiness may not be as effective at generating happiness compared to pursuing some other goal or set of principles that leads indirectly to secure happiness. Gaus is in this tradition of indirection, both in terms of understanding the function of social rules but also the way he makes his arguments. It can be hard for the reader to move from question, through method, to answer. Gaus’s answers are inevitably difficult to break down and summarise. Rather than a manifesto for action or a constitution of a free society, we get a sense of awe at what open societies have managed to achieve and a peak at the mechanisms that maintain them. The complete answer still seems beyond current comprehension. This is not a direct criticism of Gaus; rather the seriousness with which he takes the subject matter means we are necessarily denied the sweet taste of simple, bold, conclusions. Instead, the reader’s enlightenment is slow, subtle and incremental.
As with conjectural historical approaches more generally, aspects of Gaus’s argument are potentially fragile to his interpretation of the empirical literature. When engaged in anthropological and historical inquiry, there is an ever-present risk of looking at the evidence through the lens of contemporary concerns and paradigms. We can all too easily stare at the experience, data, and testimony, easily lost in translation and fragmentary due to destruction of past texts, and have our own perspective conveniently stare back. Gaus has taken great care to emphasise the complexity of humanity’s evolutionary history. Nevertheless, it is bound to be open to re-assessment and further contestation. Another addition to the fossil record or the resituating of an archaeological artefact could twist the history and perhaps cast it in new light.
Gaus also leaves something for scholars working in the open society paradigm to consider. While concerned with the defence of liberal democracies in the face of both populist and technocratic forces, he has comparatively little to say about the complexities and performance of apparently stable non-democratic regimes. Is democracy a fundamental commitment for liberals or a contingent one? Pragmatically, are some societies better off aiming at good governance with a degree of tolerance but without necessarily formal representative government?
The Open Society and Its Complexities offers the best account and defence of a realistic cosmopolitan liberalism I have read. What makes Gaus’s approach particularly interesting, and in this it shares some DNA with Chandran Kukathas’s Liberal Archipelago (2003), is the way the state as well as the nation is de-centred without being ignored. States and nations are important yet permeable entities, influenced by external actors, cultural norms, and different levels of local governance. As well as acknowledging humanity’s diversity, Gaus’s liberalism is more in keeping with the reality of the newly connected (if not quite ‘globalised’) world order where firms, associations, cities, regions, religions, linguistic and ethnic groups feature as prominent actors and influences alongside states. The Open Society and Its Complexities is a critically important and compelling work that does much to revive the great and open society paradigm while offering a novel approach, if not precisely an answer, to the fundamental questions of political obligation and the nature of self-governance. It is also an intellectual inspiration for genuinely empirically-informed social philosophy.
References
Cowen, N., Virk, B., Mascarenhas-Keyes, S., & Cartwright, N. (2017). Randomized Controlled Trials: How Can We Know “What Works”? Critical Review, 29(3), 265–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2017.1395223
Gaus, G. F. (2012). The order of public reason: a theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gaus, G. F. (2021). The open society and its complexities. New York (N.Y.): Oxford university press.
Hayek, F. A. von. (1973). Law, legislation, and liberty: Rules and Order (Reprinted 1993., Vol. 1). London: Routledge.
Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous (First edition.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Koppl, R., Gatti, R. C., Devereaux, A., Fath, B. D., Herriot, J., Hordijk, W., et al. (2023). Explaining Technology (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009386289
Kukathas, C. (2003). The Liberal Archipelago. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/019925754X.001.0001/acprof-9780199257546. Accessed 22 December 2015
Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge.
Rizzo, M. J. (2025). Liberalism as a philosophy of indirection: Some early perspectives. Constitutional Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-025-09476-1
About the author
Nick Cowen is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Buckingham. He is the author of Neoliberal Social Justice (Edward Elgar, 2021).