WordNet
n. a society that allows its members considerable freedom (as in a democracy); "America's open society has made it an easy target for terrorists"
Wikipedia
The open society is a concept originally suggested in 1932 by the Jewish French philosopher Henri Bergson, and developed during the Second World War by Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper.
Popper saw the open society as standing on a historical continuum reaching from the organic, tribal, or closed society, through the open society marked by a critical attitude to tradition, up to the abstract or depersonalised society lacking all face-to-face interaction transactions.
In open societies, the government is expected to be responsive and tolerant, and political mechanisms are said to be transparent and flexible. Advocates claim that it is opposed to authoritarianism.
Popper is, however, considered to be an insider of Vienna thinkers, like Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann, who advocated and developed Game Theory, a theory of government lacking transparency. See f.e. Veblen, Thorsten: The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe.
Usage examples of "open society".
No matter how successful we are, because of the nature of our open society and the terrorist threats, we will probably still suffer occasional terrorist attacks in the future.
Instead of taking a man out of the under-stimulating, tightly regimented life of the prison and plunging him violently and without preparation into open society, he is moved first to an intermediate institution which permits him to work in the community by day, while continuing to return to the institution at night.
Ultimately, I hoped for a better, more free and open society on all the Diamond worlds.
People who walked in certain high circles liked to boast of their personal cloneleggers, as one might of an attack beast trained for the Arenas, but no one had a good word for them in open society.
Consequently, the centaurs had grown up in an open society and had no means of providing privacy to people who grew up with different concepts.
As Kumylzhensky thundered on about the alleged misdeeds of the Twentieth Directorate, it became evident to world observers that the KGB as a whole had been acting to bring about the downfall of Party and military right-wingers, and restore the impetus toward an open society in the Soviet Union that had been so tragically reversed following the death of Kumylzhensky's predecessor.
That vulnerability had been very aptly demonstrated back in 2001, and the Americans had attempted to respond, while maintaining their open society.
But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn't be such a big deal.