Overview
The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror is a book by the financier, philanthropist, and author George Soros, published in 2006 by PublicAffairs. It belongs to a sequence of books in which Soros, best known as a hedge-fund investor and as the founder of the Open Society Foundations, sought to set out his broader philosophical and political ideas and to apply them to contemporary public affairs. Written during the second term of the George W. Bush administration, the book combines Soros’s long-standing intellectual preoccupations—drawn heavily from the philosophy of Karl Popper—with a critical assessment of American politics and foreign policy in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Author and intellectual context
George Soros (born 1930 in Budapest) emigrated from Hungary and studied at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by Karl Popper, whose work on the “open society” became a lifelong touchstone for Soros’s thinking. After achieving enormous success in international finance, Soros devoted much of his wealth and attention to philanthropy through his network of Open Society foundations and to writing books that attempt to articulate a coherent worldview.
A recurring feature of Soros’s writing is his insistence on human fallibility—the idea that human understanding of the world is inherently imperfect—and on the related concept he calls reflexivity, the notion that participants’ perceptions and the situations they seek to understand influence one another, so that thinking and reality are not cleanly separable. These ideas run through his earlier books, including The Alchemy of Finance, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, and The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Age of Fallibility continues this project, with fallibility placed explicitly in the title as the organizing theme.
Subject and argument
The book applies Soros’s conceptual framework to the political condition of the United States in the post-9/11 period. Its subtitle, Consequences of the War on Terror, signals its critical engagement with the policies pursued under the Bush administration. Soros treats the “war on terror” as a framing that he regards as flawed and counterproductive, and he examines what he sees as its damaging effects on American democracy, on the country’s standing in the world, and on the ideal of an open society that he champions.
In keeping with his emphasis on fallibility, Soros argues that a healthy society must recognize the imperfection of its own understanding and remain open to correction, in contrast to political rhetoric and policy built on false certainty. He connects these arguments to his broader defense of the open society against what he views as its distortions, drawing on the Popperian framework that informs all of his writing.
Significance and reception
The book is one of a series of politically engaged works Soros produced in the 2000s that combined his philosophical framework with pointed criticism of the direction of American policy. As with his other books, it drew attention less for academic novelty than because of Soros’s prominence as a financier, philanthropist, and political donor, and his outspoken opposition to the Bush administration during this period. It stands within his larger body of work as a further attempt to popularize his concepts of fallibility and reflexivity and to advocate for the ideals of the open society in a specific contemporary political context.
