Criticism
Left-wing critics of Soros and the Open Society Foundations argue that these institutions serve primarily to reinforce the existing social order. Nicolas Guilhot, writing in Critical Sociology, connects the Soros charities to the history of capitalist philanthropy maintained by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. Guilhot argues that control over the social sciences by monied interests has depoliticized this field and reinforced a capitalist view of modernization. He argues that despite critiques of malfunctioning free markets, Soros is actually a neoliberal who believes that competitive markets are the best way to organize society. According to this view, the apparent radicalism of Soros' "open society" serves as cover for the capitalist order, the basic rules of which are never actually questioned or 'opened'.
Right-wing critics—notably Fox News host Glenn Beck—have criticized Soros for using his Open Society Foundations to intentionally undermine societies with the intention of establishing a unitary global government. Beck has argued that the Open Society Foundations have too much control over academics and media, and in some countries have obtained political power that qualifies them as "shadow governments". Supporters of Beck's theory have argued that Soros buys good press by funding Media Matters and Huffington Post.
Read more about this topic: Open Society Foundations
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)