Open and Closed Societies: Voegelin as Reader of Bergson

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Voegelin often cites Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. For both thinkers, the openness of society to mankind cannot be achieved without a spiritual mediation. But this apparent agreement hides substantial differences, due to the fact that, in the 1930s, Voegelin had already developed from other sources his own ‘open-closed' conceptual pair. One of the major differences is that, for Voegelin, the primitive society, far from being a ‘closed' society, is a ‘very opened society'. The shift does not operate at the level of the fundamental experience of the soul, but at the level of the articulation of symbols. The ‘open society' designates a perennial anthropological structure: thus, the ‘closed society' does not precede it, but rather designates a corruption of it, which is a characteristic feature of modern societies. This difference has another consequence concerning the status of democracy, allowing Voegelin to overcome the hidden aristocratic ground of the Bergsonian distinction between the minority of spiritual heroes and the majority of dormant mystics. Yet, the concept of ‘open society' functions for the two thinkers as a critical instrument of evaluation of our contemporary industrial age, both refusing, albeit with different tones, pessimistic fatalism as well as optimistic progressivism.