‘Open society’ is the idea of a society that is more open than another society. Such discourse can be seen in the works of the Ancient Greeks, e.g., who had contests in court about free speech (see e.g. The Trial of Socrates) and discourses on appropriate rearing.
"Henri Bergson describes a closed society as a closed system of law or religion. It is static, like a closed mind.[5]Bergson suggests that if all traces of civilization were to disappear, the instincts of the closed society for including or excluding others would remain.[6]"
The idea of a society more open than another is probably as old as the idea of society itself, ‘the open society’ was commented upon in 1932 by French philosopher Henri Bergson.[1][2] The idea was further developed during the Second World War by Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. "Popper saw the classical Greeks as initiating the long slow transition from tribalism towards the open society, and as facing for the first time the strain imposed by the less personal group relations entailed thereby.[8]"
Standing atop a grand, abstract summit, the open society derives its name not only from its differentiation to the closed society, but through that which it opens onto. The open society moves in the direction of what Bergson had called the élan vital, the impulse or force that compels self-organization in matter and morphogenesis through time. Such a movement is an affair of life itself, the sifting apart of the organic from the inorganic, organization from base matter. By ascending up a cosmological hierarchy in order to enter into unending engagement with this force, the mark of the open society is life at its most creative. [Berger f12-18]
‘The open society’ was commented upon by Karl Popper.