The Open Society and Its Enemies

Summary

The Open Society and Its Enemies is Karl Popper's two-volume critique of philosophies that claim to know the laws of history and to justify a closed, planned society. Popper wrote it in New Zealand between 1938 and 1943, after the annexation of Austria, as what he later called his war work, and it was published in London by Routledge in 1945. Volume I is titled The Spell of Plato; Volume II, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath. The text remains under copyright and no full text is included in the library. Popper's central contrast is between the closed society, a tribal order bound by taboo and custom in which individuals do not take personal responsibility for decisions, and the open society, in which people face personal decisions and criticize their institutions. He names his main opponent historicism, the belief that history moves according to discoverable laws toward a destined end, and links it with essentialism and with utopian or holistic social engineering, the attempt to remake society according to a blueprint. Volume I begins with Heraclitus and then devotes most of its chapters to Plato. Popper argues that Plato, troubled by the social upheavals of his time, developed a theory of Forms and of decay from a perfect original state, and that the Republic's account of justice as each class keeping its place, the rule of philosopher-kings, the use of the noble lie and the subordination of the individual to the city amount to a programme for arresting change. Against this he sets what he calls the Great Generation of Athens, including Pericles and Democritus, and above all Socrates, whom he presents as an individualist and critic. He proposes replacing the question 'Who should rule?' with the question of how institutions can be arranged so that bad rulers do as little harm as possible, and defines democracy as a system in which rulers can be removed without bloodshed. A note to Chapter 7 states the paradoxes of freedom, tolerance and democracy. Volume II traces historicism from Aristotle's essentialism to Hegel, whom Popper treats very severely, and then gives most of its length to a respectful but critical analysis of Marx, praising his moral protest against the suffering of early industrial workers while rejecting his prophecy of inevitable revolution. Popper argues that the unrestrained capitalism Marx described has been transformed by piecemeal intervention. The final chapters discuss the sociology of knowledge, the revolt against reason, and whether history has a meaning; Popper answers that it has none of its own, but that we can give it meaning by our aims. The book made Popper widely known. Classicists such as Ronald Levinson and John Wild defended Plato against what they judged an unhistorical reading, and Walter Kaufmann sharply criticized the treatment of Hegel.

Top Lessons

• Ask how to limit the damage rulers can do

  Popper argues that political philosophy went wrong by asking who should rule, since every answer assumes the rulers will be good. He proposes instead designing institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can be removed peacefully and prevented from doing too much harm.

• Piecemeal reform rather than blueprints

  In Chapter 9 Popper distinguishes utopian engineering, which tries to remake society as a whole according to an ideal, from piecemeal engineering, which attacks the most urgent evils one at a time. Because we cannot foresee all consequences, he argues, reform should proceed by small steps that allow us to learn from mistakes.

• The limits of tolerance

  Popper's note on the paradox of tolerance argues that a society which tolerates without limit those who would destroy tolerance by force may lose tolerance altogether. He holds that intolerant views should be countered by rational argument as long as possible, while reserving the right to resist those who refuse argument and answer it with violence.

• History has no meaning of its own, but we may give it one

  Popper rejects the idea that history moves by laws toward a predetermined goal and that we must simply cooperate with it. He argues that people are responsible for the aims they choose, and that history gains meaning from the purposes they pursue.

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A work of political philosophy with no medical content.