Diversity and Self-Organized Complexity

Part II of the volume takes up Hayek’s second unsettling thesis: that the Open Society is too complex for the practice of moral justification. To begin to analyze this unsettling thesis, it first considers the nature of the Open Society, and why it is characterized by extreme diversity and complexity. Thus the first section of this essay seeks to distinguish Millian and other liberalisms from the far more deeply diverse Open Society. It then argues that the Open Society is characterized by a process of autocatalytic diversity, which leads to ever-increasing complexity. This second essay concludes with an account of how the constitutive moral rules of the Open Society can be justified. It endorses Hayek’s criticism of social contract theory, proposing in its stead a self-organization model of moral justification.