The Open Society and Its Enemies

Overview

The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in two volumes in London in 1945, is Karl Popper's great work of political philosophy — and, by his own account, his contribution to the war effort. Written largely in New Zealand, where Popper, an Austrian Jew, had found refuge from the Nazis, the book is a massive and polemical history of political thought organized around a single thesis: that the great enemies of freedom have been the prophets of a closed society, and that the tradition of critical rationalism, from Socrates to the scientific method, is the only reliable defense of the open society. The book's first volume attacks Plato, its second attacks Hegel and Marx, and its conclusion defends "piecemeal social engineering" against every form of utopianism.

The book made Popper famous far beyond the philosophy of science, and it has remained one of the most widely read works of political philosophy ever written. It is also one of the most contested: professional classicists and Marx scholars have objected to its readings, while its defenders have insisted that its polemical energy is inseparable from its insight. Whatever one thinks of its scholarship, its central categories — the open and the closed society, historicism, utopian versus piecemeal engineering — have entered the vocabulary of political thought.

Author

Karl Popper (1902–1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science and politics. He grew up in Vienna, studied at the University of Vienna, and worked as a teacher and in social work with children before establishing himself as a philosopher with The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, in German). His philosophy of science, known as critical rationalism or falsificationism, holds that science progresses not by accumulating confirmations but by proposing bold hypotheses and subjecting them to attempted refutation: a theory is scientific if it is falsifiable, and a hypothesis is confirmed in the only way it can be — by surviving criticism. Popper saw this method as the model of all rational inquiry, including politics: institutions should be judged by their capacity to detect and correct errors, not by their correspondence to a utopian ideal.

Historical Background

The book was conceived in the catastrophe of the 1930s. Popper watched the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria, the triumph of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and the failure of the Western democracies to defend themselves. His conviction, formed in this context, was that the intellectual justification of tyranny lay in historicism — the doctrine that history moves by inexorable laws toward a predetermined goal, and that those who have understood these laws are entitled, or obliged, to force the course of history toward its end. Plato's philosopher-king, Hegel's world spirit, and Marx's dialectical materialism were, in Popper's reading, the great philosophical ancestors of this doctrine. The book's polemical form reflects its origin in wartime: Popper wrote it, he said, to defend freedom while there was still time, and the book's urgency is part of its argument.

Key Ideas

The Open and the Closed Society

Popper's central distinction is between the closed society and the open society. The closed society is the tribal, magical society: its members live under an unexamined order that presents itself as natural and unchangeable; social roles, customs, and beliefs are fixed; and criticism is experienced as betrayal. The open society is the society of criticism and choice: its institutions are recognized as human artifacts, its laws as revisable, and its members are free to question everything, including the foundations of the society itself. The transition from the closed to the open society, Popper argues, is the great drama of Western history — and the great reactions against it, from Plato to Marx, are the subject of his book.

The Critique of Historicism

Historicism, as Popper defines it, is the doctrine that the task of social science is to discover the laws of historical development, and that politics should be guided by these laws toward a predetermined end. Popper's objection is both logical and moral. Logically, there can be no laws of historical development, because the future depends on the growth of knowledge, and we cannot know today what we will know tomorrow. Morally, historicism licenses tyranny: if history must move toward its goal, then anyone who obstructs the goal is an enemy, and everything is permitted in the name of the future. The doctrine is refuted, Popper thinks, by the simplest of arguments: because the future is unknowable, any politics based on claiming to know it is based on a pretense.

Plato, Hegel, and Marx

The bulk of the book is devoted to close readings of the three great enemies. Plato is read as the first systematic enemy of the open society: the Republic's philosopher-king, the myth of metals, the censorship, and the communism of the guardians are all interpreted as a totalitarian project born of reaction against the Athenian democracy that had killed Socrates. Hegel is read as the philosopher of authority and the state, whose dialectic dissolves the standards of criticism into the triumphal march of the world spirit. Marx is read with more respect but no less severity: Popper acknowledges Marx's sincerity and his genuine contributions, but he argues that Marx's historicism — the doctrine that capitalism must inevitably collapse — is a prophecy dressed as science, and that the attempt to realize it produced the totalitarianism Marx would have abhorred.

Piecemeal Social Engineering

Against historicism and utopianism, Popper defends piecemeal social engineering: the method of reforming society step by step, experimentally, always ready to correct errors in the light of results. The piecemeal engineer asks what is wrong here and now and how it can be fixed; the utopian engineer asks what the perfect society would look like and how to build it. The first is the political analogue of the scientific method — trial and error, criticism, correction. The second is the political analogue of dogma — a vision that cannot be tested because it is too large and too distant, and that licenses every means in pursuit of its end. The defense of democracy, for Popper, is ultimately the defense of a method: the peaceful removal of bad governments, which is the political form of the criticism of error.

Important Passages

The book's most quoted passages are its aphoristic summaries of its thesis. The distinction between the two kinds of society is announced in the introduction: "The closed society is characterized by the belief in magical taboos, while the open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos." Its account of historicism is condensed in the claim that "the belief in the inexorable laws of historical destiny is the most ancient of superstitions" — a superstition, Popper argues, that has been dressed in scientific costume. And its conclusion states the ethical core: "There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way — we must return to the beasts." The alternative to the closed society is not another closed society but the permanent, unfinished, and demanding work of freedom.

Influence

The Open Society and Its Enemies has had an extraordinary influence. It helped shape the postwar liberal consensus in the English-speaking world, and its critique of totalitarianism became a reference point for the Cold War defense of liberal democracy. Popper's terms — "open society," "historicism," "piecemeal engineering" — are still used in political debate, and the book has been translated into dozens of languages. Its influence extends to the philosophy of social science, where Popper's demand that social theories be testable shaped the method of the social sciences. It has also been the object of sustained criticism: classicists have objected to the reading of Plato, Marx scholars to the reading of Marx, and critics of Popper's philosophy of science have argued that his political conclusions rest on a too-simple epistemology. The debate the book provoked is itself evidence of the vitality of its questions: what do we owe to the future, and what are we permitted to do in its name?

Sources

• Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Karl Popper" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Popper's Political Philosophy" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper-political)