The Abstract Society “We can conceive,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper in 1946, before television, computers or iPhones, “of a society in which men practically never meet face to face—in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. . . . Such a fictitious society might be called a completely abstract or depersonalized society.”1 This passage is remarkable in several ways. It is certainly prescient. The idea—if not the prose—is more like something you would have found at the time in Amazing Stories or the adventures of Tom Swift, rather than buried in a difficult two-volume essay on democracy, fascism and knowledge. It is also very honest. Popper was, in effect, offering a warning about his own ideas concerning open societies—namely, that such societies could easily become “abstract” or “depersonalized.” Popper was a fierce advocate of openness, and he saw open societies as being marked by their values: they are committed to freedom of speech and thought, equality, reasonableness and an attitude of progressive criticism.
