POPPER (Karl R.)
The Open Society and its Enemies. Volume I. The Spell of Plato. Volume II. The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath.
A CLASSIC OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
POPPER (Karl R.)
The Open Society and its Enemies. Volume I. The Spell of Plato. Volume II. The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath.
Karl Popper’s most famous work and surely one the great classics of twentieth-century political philosophy. Popper’s defence of the ‘open society’ had ‘obvious affinities with what John Stuart Mill had argued for in On Liberty: a society in which argument was the norm, where moral, political, scientific, and religious doctrines were constantly questioned and revised. What was unusual about The Open Society and its Enemies was not only its sustained assault on the enemies of the open society but its concentration on the way in which their philosophical errors became politically dangerous. Volume 1 depicted Plato as both a proto-communist and a proto-fascist, and emphasized the ways in which his theory of knowledge with its emphasis on the intuitive grasp of essences licensed intellectual authoritarianism, and therefore political authoritarianism. Volume 2, subtitled ‘The high tide of prophecy’, savaged Hegel and Marx for claiming to have arrived at the definitive truth about the future of humanity and the political implications of that truth’ (ODNB).
