Political Stability in the Open Society

Abstract

We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the wellordered society, fails to accommodate deep disagreement and is insufficiently dynamic. In response, we formulate an alternative model that we call the open society, organized around a new account of dynamic stability. In the open society, constitutional rules must be stable enough to preserve social conditions that foster experimentation, while leaving room in legal and institutional rules for innovation and change. Systemic robustness and dynamic stability become important for the open society in a way that they are not in the well-ordered society. This model of the open society and the corresponding model of stability has interesting implications for thinking about the goals, norms, and institutions of liberal political systems.

Towards a ‘pluralist’ world order: creative agency and legitimacy in global institutions

“…Whereas collective rational agency requires some substantial social 'closure' of political contestation around the definition of common interests or identities, a political commitment to empowering creative political agency implies a contrasting 'openness' in the definitions of common interests or identities that unify members of political communities, and in corresponding political boundaries. The conception of 'open' political communities we invoke here is closely related to those endorsed by some liberals with strong pluralist leanings as the basis for state legitimacy (Gaus, 2016;Popper, 2013;Thrasher and Vallier, 2018), insofar as they share a commitment to opening a wide range of institutional rules to ongoing contestation driven by experimentalist political agency. But whereas statist liberals remain committed to preserving the incontestability of some set of 'constitutional' rules backed by normative 'limiting principles' of a more familiar (morally) rationalist variety (Thrasher and Valliers, 2018), our pluralist conception of openness goes further in extending the requirement of contestability even to the most fundamental rules within the political order.…”

The rationality of political experimentation

“…Radical experiments could, for instance, upend prevailing workable conceptions of the right, a risk not worth taking in most generally functional societies. This is why, rightly in my view, theorists such as Thrasher and Vallier (2018: 402–404) maintain that while a flourishing and dynamic society may include widespread experimentation with first-order rules, the stability of its constitutional rules ought to be preserved. 55…”

“…A paradigmatic radical experiment involves a society’s ‘constitutional rules’ specifically or, using HLA Hart’s (1994) broader term, a society’s ‘secondary rules’. 45 Constitutional rules, say John Thrasher and Kevin Vallier, are higher-order rules that govern other legal or institutional rules. The latter rules, in turn, apply to individual and institutional behavior (2018: 402).…”

“…One final point. Thrasher and Vallier approvingly observe that ‘[i]n the open society, all institutional rules are subject to change’ (2018: 402–404; italics removed). They pair this view with a denial of the claim that constitutional rules themselves ought to be changed.…”

The fundamental Coase of development: property rights foundations of the effective state

“…The development of the protective–productive state in Western Europe was the result of the peculiar governance structure that characterized the region during the High Middle Ages 5 . This was a polycentric governance structure (Aligica and Tarko, 2013; Ostrom, 2009; Thrasher and Vallier, 2018), in which competition for a mobile tax base constituted a de facto constraint on the ruler's predatory ambitions (North, 1979). 6 Competition among governance providers, in turn, created a sociopolitical ‘space’ in which commercial society could flourish (Cox, 2017; Lopez, 1976).…”