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civil society
August 2009 
Saving the world - What George Soros thinks
Posted on Feb 25th, 2007
by 
janos
janos
As a practical philospher, George Soros may be in a class of his own.
As he says in the prologue to his book, The Age of Fallibility, he "combines three qualifications":
He has
As he says in the prologue to his book, The Age of Fallibility, he "combines three qualifications":
He has
- a conceptual framework that has given him a way of understanding history;
- a set of firm ethical and political beliefs;
- a lot of money to nurture the political seeds of Open Society in many troubled parts of the world.
Access: Public
Unfortunately no one mind can cover all the ramifications of problems in a complex world. For doing that, coordinated teams are necessary.
It is possible, however, to identify the limited number of fundamental issues to form a unifying framework to guide progressive collaborative research.
Power to exert influence is part of social reality but it is a reasonable ambition devise systems that renders this power self-limiting, and thereby limit the corrupting effect of power.
Monopolistic practices are one form of power that tends to eliminate the self-limiting character of power.
There are two fundamental monopolies in modern society which pose an increasing threat to stability as social complexity grows over historical time spans. The two are monopoly ownership of natural resources; and sole authority to issue money in society. The danger actually lies in practicing the monopolies in order to benefit private, as opposed to social interests.
But Soros does not address this important issue directly and fails to deal with the roots of many symptomatic problems he covers.