On The Open Society and Its Enemies

Karl Popper called The Open Society and Its Enemies his war work. An Austrian philosopher who had fled the Nazis, he wrote it in exile during the Second World War as his contribution to the fight, not with weapons but with ideas, a defense of the open society against the thinkers he believed had armed its enemies. The surprising part is who he put on trial: not just modern totalitarians but Plato himself, the founder of Western philosophy, whom Popper read as an enemy of the free society he claimed to perfect.

Popper's central distinction is between the open society and the closed one. A closed society is tribal, organic, governed by fixed custom and the conviction that it embodies a single right order which dissent threatens. An open society is one in which individuals are free to make their own decisions, where institutions can be criticized and changed, where no one claims final knowledge of the good and where the response to error is correction rather than suppression. The open society is the achievement of free, critical, fallible people governing themselves by argument; the closed society is the dream of those who think they have found the final truth and need only impose it.

His charge against Plato, and later against Hegel and Marx, is that they were enemies of openness because they claimed to know history's destination, the perfect state, the inevitable end, and so licensed the suppression of anyone who stood in the way. Popper called this historicism, the belief that history follows knowable laws toward a predetermined goal, and he considered it the intellectual root of totalitarianism. If you know where history must go, every cruelty along the way can be justified as midwifery for the inevitable.

Against the grand planners Popper set what he called piecemeal social engineering: the unglamorous work of identifying specific, concrete problems, trying specific remedies, watching for the errors, and correcting them. This is the political method of the open society, modest, experimental, reversible, always open to the discovery that you were wrong. It is the opposite of the utopian who would remake society whole according to a blueprint and silence anyone who questions it. Popper's faith was that we cannot know the perfect society in advance, and that the honest response to that ignorance is a politics built to learn from its mistakes.

The book belongs in this library as one of the great philosophical defenses of free, self-correcting government, and as a bracing reminder that some of the most dangerous political ideas come dressed as the highest wisdom. It is the natural companion to Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism, also on these shelves.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is in copyright and available in print and digital editions. It is two volumes and demanding, but the core argument, open versus closed, the critique of historicism, the case for piecemeal reform, can be grasped from the early chapters and the famous attack on Plato.