Soros on Types of Socities

Pages 106-108:

Instead of a dichotomy between open and closed society, I now envisage open society occupying a precarious middle ground, where it is threatened by dogmatic beliefs of all kinds -- some that would impose a closed society, others that would lead to the disintegration of society...

...many things are possible in revolutionary situations that are inconceivable in normal times... When I was fourteen, in 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and engaged in genocide against the Jews; I might not have survived had it not been for my father. He realized that this was a far-from-equilibrium situation in which the normal rules did not apply... I learned that the same rules do not apply at all times... Bureaucratic institutions, in particular, are constitutionally ill-suited for the task. That is why they tend to break down and collapse if the dynamic disequilibrium becomes too severe...

The fact that I had to revise a dichotomy and replace it with a tripartite division should warn us how precarious these divisions are. That does not detract from the values of the insights they provide, but it reminds us forcefully that the categories have been introduced by us and are not found in reality.