Overview
In Defense of Open Society is a book by George Soros, the Hungarian-born American investor, philanthropist, and political thinker, published in 2019 by PublicAffairs. Rather than a continuous single-argument treatise, the volume is a compilation drawing on Soros’s speeches, essays, lectures, and public statements, brought together to present the ideas he has advanced over decades of public life. It gathers material spanning his thinking on philosophy, finance, politics, and philanthropy, and frames these under the unifying banner of the “open society” concept with which he has most closely identified.
The book appeared late in Soros’s career, at a time when he had become both a globally prominent funder of liberal and democratic causes and a frequent target of nationalist and authoritarian politicians and of conspiracy theories. It can be read as a retrospective statement of the principles that guided his philanthropy and his engagement with world affairs, offered as a defense of those principles against the political currents he saw rising in the late 2010s.
Author and intellectual context
George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 and survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a Jewish child before the country came under Communist rule. He emigrated and studied at the London School of Economics, where he encountered the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies had a decisive and lasting influence on Soros’s worldview, and the phrase “open society” became the organizing idea of his later philanthropic and political activity. He went on to a highly successful career in finance, founding and running hedge funds, and became one of the wealthiest investors of his era.
Beginning in the 1980s and expanding after the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, Soros channeled a large part of his fortune into philanthropy through what became the Open Society Foundations, a network supporting civil society, education, human rights, independent media, and democratic institutions in many countries. Central European University, which he founded, is one of the best-known institutions associated with his giving.
Throughout his career Soros also sought to be taken seriously as a thinker. He developed and repeatedly returned to his concept of “reflexivity,” the idea that in social and financial affairs the participants’ thinking influences the situations they are trying to understand, so that there is a two-way feedback between perception and reality that undermines the notion of markets or societies tending toward a stable equilibrium. Related to this is his emphasis on human “fallibility”—the claim that our understanding of the world is inherently imperfect—which he links directly to the case for open society, because a society that recognizes no one has a monopoly on truth must remain open to correction, dissent, and change.
Subject and central themes
The book’s overarching subject is the defense of the open society as both a political ideal and a philosophical stance. Drawing on Popper, Soros contrasts open societies—pluralistic, democratic, tolerant of dissent, and premised on the acknowledgment that human knowledge is fallible—with closed societies built on claims to final truth, whether by totalitarian ideologies, authoritarian rulers, or narrow nationalisms.
Several themes recur across the collected material:
- The open society under threat. Soros writes about what he saw as a resurgence of authoritarian and nationalist politics, and about the pressures facing democratic institutions and civil society. He treats the open society not as a settled achievement but as something perpetually vulnerable and in need of active defense.
- His philosophical framework. The volume presents his ideas on fallibility and reflexivity, connecting his theory of how financial markets and social processes actually work to his political and ethical commitments.
- Finance, economics, and crisis. Reflecting his career as an investor, the book addresses financial markets, the dynamics of booms and busts, and economic crises, including his thinking on the European Union and the strains around the euro. Soros has long argued for particular reforms and warned about structural weaknesses in the European project, and this concern is part of the collection.
- Europe and the European Union. Soros expresses strong commitment to European integration while also voicing criticism and concern about the EU’s difficulties, viewing a strong, cohesive Europe as important to the survival of open societies.
- Philanthropy and civil society. The book reflects on the mission and record of the Open Society Foundations and on the purposes of his giving.
- His own life and the attacks against him. As a survivor of both Nazi and Communist rule in Hungary, and as a figure who became a lightning rod for hostility, Soros addresses his personal history and the political attacks and conspiracy theories directed at him.
Place in Soros’s work and significance
In Defense of Open Society stands within a body of writing that Soros produced alongside his financial and philanthropic careers, which includes earlier books elaborating his views on markets, reflexivity, global capitalism, and political affairs. Compared with his more focused single-topic books, this volume functions as a gathering and restatement of his core convictions across the range of his concerns—philosophical, financial, and political—assembled toward the end of his active public life.
Its significance lies partly in its character as a summary manifesto from a figure who had become emblematic, to admirers, of liberal internationalism and support for democracy and human rights, and, to detractors, a symbol invoked in nationalist and conspiratorial rhetoric. The book was published amid this polarized environment and is best understood as Soros’s own articulation and defense of the ideals he had spent much of his fortune promoting.
