**6. Practical considerations**

Let us consider contemporary global problems to see how the idea of open society has played out in our times. How far, for example, can we say our society is open?8 Popper listed five contemporary issues that impair the advent of an open society at the global level, namely: (1) world peace (against nuclear weapons), (2) population explosion, (3) bureaucracy, (4) children's education (against media propaganda of sex and violence), and (5) crime. It is impossible to provide a comprehensive list of the challenges, by nation, community, neighborhood, family, and individual, that threaten the open society. It is equally impossible to address these and many other challenges without an open society wherein theories are given as nets that provide further outlets, and not as walls that bar human creativity. Recently, several areas of vulnerabilities have come to the forefront: economic interdependence of our world, dozens of pacific Islands in danger of submersion, increasing weather-induced disasters, relentless incurable diseases, and global poverty. Critical discussion lends itself to be the forum of concerted efforts to make the world a better place. In my view, Popper neglected to give much of his attention to several key issues, including, but not limited to, women, animals, minorities, the environment, indigenous cultures, and the disabled.

#### **7. Conclusion**

While extensive literature has raised awareness about Popper's idea of falsifiability, it has given little to no attention Popper's social doctrine. Consequently, Popper's legacy figures among one of the most misunderstood topics of our times. To add to this lacuna, a great deal of Popper's material remains unpublished. His thinking is remarkably social, seeking to defend and improve people's lives in an open society, an open world, and an open universe, through an open science. The idea of chosen people is so engrained in our minds that we tend to see a few people as actors on the stage of history and others as recipients and emulators. Open society represents the core tenet of Popper's writings. Against the widespread belief that the social sciences represent a weak form of science, Popper supplied us with a strong sense of the social sciences as being fully scientific, objective, and empirical. It is erroneous to think that the laws of physics do not apply to the emotional and social

<sup>8</sup> See Popper's (2008, pp. 391-393) latest reflections on the open society.

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#### **8. Acknowledgements**

Special thanks to Carol E. Warrior and Thomas A. Stuby of the University of Washington for their comments on this chapter.

#### **9. References**


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**8. Acknowledgements** 

**9. References** 

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**3**

Jaap den Hollander *University of Groningen,* 

*The Netherlands* 

**Historicism, Hermeneutics,**

**Second Order Observation:**

**Luhmann Observed by a Historian** 

An element shared by sociology and history, and to a certain extent by social or cultural anthropology as well, is their claim to study society as a whole. Whereas economy, law, political science, religious studies or linguistics concentrate on a single aspect of society, the aforementioned disciplines aspire to integrate all aspects into a comprehensive and coherent picture. This requires, first, specialist knowledge about the several subsystems of society, which is provided by a great number of subdisciplines, and, second, a theory synthesizing all this knowledge and explaining how these subsystems hang together. The second

First, there is the complexity of the network of relations between the subsystems of society. Social theorists, particularly modernization theorists often oversimplified this reality by reducing the development of society to a single system, most often the economy. A classic case is the economic determinism of Marxism. A more recent example is Neoliberalism with its claim that everything starts with the free market, including political democracy. It is undoubtedly true that democracy prospers in a free and thriving society, but utterly misleading to suggest that politics depends on the economy in a linear-causal way. One might just as well argue that there would be no free market without a state prohibiting monopolies and safeguarding legal security and other public services. These opposing views show that we should not think in terms of linear but of circular relations. Politics and economy condition each other, and so do all other subsystems of society, which adds up to

Second, macro theories must take into account another circularity, namely between subject and object. Each attempt to describe a social whole of which one is oneself a part entails an element of subjectivity or self-referentiality, which is a serious problem from the perspective of traditional epistemology. For historians the problem becomes serious when they start thinking about contextualism. It seems perfectly all right to place a text or event in its historical context, but the question is how to define context. It seems that we can circumscribe a context only from the perspective of a wider context, but then we will have to look for the context of this wider context, and so on. This infinite regress will go on until we reach the ultimate context of world history or universal history, which can be defined only

requirement is hard to satisfy because of the great complexity of the task.

**1. Introduction** 

an overwhelming complexity.

Rosenberg, A. (2008). *Philosophy of Social Science* (3rd ed.), Westview Press, Philadelphia, PA.

