Patent medicine for mankind

Judging from his publications, since semi-retiring from his hedge fund empire George Soros has sorted out the world’s problems at the rate of about one a year: George Soros on Globalisation, Soros on Global Capitalism, Soros on Democracy, Soros on the Soviet System. Does the man have hobbies? Can we expect Soros on Pigeon-fancying, or Soros on Creating Small Formal Gardens? Hardly. Soros is on a mission. He helped topple John Major’s government when his hedge fund activity sent Sterling crashing out of the ERM. Now he is after bigger game. ‘I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections.’ Soros not only helps to overthrow tyrants; he can nation-build too. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he says he was ‘prompted to rush in and establish Open Society Found- ations in one country after another throughout the former Soviet empire’. Why Soros? ‘I had a good understanding of revolutionary processes, I had a firm commitment to the concept of open society, and I had substantial financial resources. Many people possessed one or two of these attributes, but nobody else had all three.’ Indeed, his spending on these Foundations rose from $3m in 1987 to more than $300m a year by 1992. When Afghanistan fell to UN forces, ‘I provided seed money to a working group that helped prepare the political process’. Soros escaped from Hungary in 1947 and studied at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced profoundly by Karl Popper. Popper’s work on open societies informs what he calls the ‘Soros Doctrine’, which aims to promote civic freedom, social justice and market mechanisms in societies which were closed politically.