The Idea of Abstract Society

Abstract

The article scrutinizes the idea of «abstract society» proposed by Karl Popper in his «Open Society» as а hypothetic society that logically finalizes the process of social evolution from closed to open society, driven by the idea of free individual being. The author considers the closed and open society not as the real types of societies as such, but as the qualitative features (moments in Hegelian terms) of all concrete societies. The main research method is dialectics, which gives us an opportunity to understand social reality as a unity of opposites: personal and abstract hypostases of human being. A research technique that the author uses for decomposing so- cial reality into its moments is «the thought experiment». This technique gives us an opportunity to deal with such unreal thing as «abstract society» taken in its pure form, and to produce herewith the substantial knowledge in terms of social epistemology. Doing so the author focuses his attention to legal and ethi- cal cornerstones of social life and applies in this respect to authoritative views of German classical philosophy, Marxism and Russian Religious philosophy. The main conclusion of the article could be formulated in the following thesis: «The impetus of critical and transforming activity of man in regard to existing social reality is in his abstract hypostasis taken as “a man as such” which manifests itself in the man’s striving towards a society free from any forms of constraint».