Open Society

He 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.

Course outline

1. 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…
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Closed Society — Hungary drives out his university — and to survive, the university first closed the parts of itself that made it what it was.
7. 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…

Part of the Symposium course library.