Open Society

Soros took from his teacher the argument that nobody can know what is right, and then spent thirty-two billion dollars installing an answer.

A course on the thought of George Soros.

Philosophy · Finance

What you will learn

Describe what a charitable lead trust does and why he says he set one up.
State the second thing that happened in 1979 and why it complicates the first.
Explain why a mixed motive is not the same as a false one.
Describe what happened to the scholarship money at the University of Cape Town.
Explain why the dissidents told him his funding was harming them.
Name the mechanism, and say where you have met it before.
State what changed between the dissident scholarships and the Hungarian foundation.
Explain why working through institutions avoided the problem of the previous module.

A Selfish Man with a Selfless Foundation — The largest political philanthropy in the world begins in 1979 as a tax arrangement for his children. In the same year he decides he has enough money. Both are true and the course will not choose…
Accomplice — The first attempt at opening a society failed, and it failed in exactly the way markets fail in the last course. His money did not add to what was there. It replaced it.
Asking Permission — In 1984 he stopped choosing people and started funding institutions — and got into Hungary by asking its government, which to his surprise said yes.
Piecemeal or Blueprint? — The sharpest objection to the whole enterprise is not made by his enemies. It is available in chapter nine of the book that started him off.
The Enemy Without a Homeland — How a man's name detached from the man and became the word for an imagined hand behind unrelated events — and how to tell that apart from ordinary criticism, which is also warranted.
Closed Society — Hungary drives out his university — and to survive, the university first closed the parts of itself that made it what it was.
The Opposite Direction — At eighty-nine he retold his father's escape. At ninety-two he handed the foundations to his son. At ninety-five, prosecutors in the United States were directed to prepare a criminal case against…

The Open Society and Its Enemies — Popper's 1945 book, the source of the piecemeal-versus-Utopian distinction and the book that started all of this in the second course.
In Defense of Open Society — Soros's 2019 collection, in which he sets out his own account of the philanthropy and retells his father's escape.
The Influence of Soros — Emily Tamkin's 2020 history of the foundations and of the myth built around them.

This course was built from 5 books.

piecemeal engineering, Utopian engineering, the open society, a charitable lead trust, Lex CEU, the opposite direction

Part of the Simposeum course library.