On Open Society's Autoimmune Diseases

Abstract

Our paper is a comparative analysis of Alexander Dugin's The Fourth Way and Karl Popper's The Open Society. Both works of the two thinkers are viewed as completely concrete (and real) conceptual frameworks, offering two radically different models of perception of the world, the individual and community relations, of the international relations. Our analysis takes into consideration both the internal, that is the “intimate enemies of democracy”, and the new (old) enemies of the open society that “relapse” through the Fourth Way. Our theoretical research is focused on the parallel between the negative starting premises for the functioning of the Open Society – historicism, utopian social engineering, collectivism and chieftainism – studied in relation to the same principles, which, respectively, are the foundation of the Fourth Political Theory. The article also considers another important problem: the thesis, that the internal, autoimmune diseases of the Open Society, are in fact the preconditions, on which the doctrines of its external opponents are based.