The Open Society and Its Enemies

The Open Society and Its Enemies is a two-volume analytical work in the field of political philosophy. This book advocates for the development of an open society—focused on individualism, humanitarianism, and universalism—within the framework of liberal democracy. The Open Society is one of the best-known works of the 20th century. It was written during the Second World War and was initially published in 1945 by Routledge in two separate volumes, followed by several subsequent editions and translations. In 2020, The Open Society and Its Enemies was republished digitally as a single Princeton Classics Kindle edition, which is the version of the text referred to in this guide.

The work’s author, Karl Popper (1902-1994), was a renowned Austrian-born scholar whose primary area of expertise was the philosophy of science. His bibliography contains works in a number of subject areas, including the sociology of knowledge, the scientific method, and other branches of philosophy. The author worked at a number of academic institutions, including the London School of Economics, where he founded the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in 1946. His work also influenced the philanthropist and billionaire George Soros, who named his grant-giving organization the Open Society Foundations, the official purpose of which is to support civil society groups in different countries.

Summary

Popper focuses much of the book on the Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 429–347 BCE) as well as the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818–1883). He does so for a number of reasons. First, he views these three thinkers as some of the most influential in the history of Western intellectual tradition. Second, each of these philosophers developed an extensive philosophical system to explain the functioning of the world around him. Third, Popper believes that Plato, Hegel, and Marx were the “enemies” of his ideal open society, as he refers to them in the title of his book.

The Open Society and Its Enemies comprises two volumes. The first volume, “The Spell of Plato,” provides a detailed analysis of Plato’s theoretic system. The author organizes this part of the book by discussing four general aspects of Plato’s work, “The Myth of Origin and Destiny,” “Plato’s Descriptive Sociology,” “Plato’s Political Program,” and “The Background of Plato’s Attack.” The first three sections focus on Plato’s philosophy, including his well-known Theory of Forms or Ideas, his advocacy against social change, his support for a rigidly structured caste-based society within the framework of a powerful state, and his ideal ruler, the philosopher-king. The fourth section discusses more general social, cultural, and political developments in Athens and other ancient Greek city-states, including Sparta, such as the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), to provide the necessary background for Plato’s motivations and to describe the changing world around him.

The second volume, “The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath,” briefly focuses on Plato’s student, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and proceeds to provide detailed evaluations of the philosophical systems developed by Hegel and Marx, respectively. Popper groups his analysis of Aristotle and Hegel in a single section, “The Rise of Oracular Philosophy,” to emphasize the intellectual trend of prophetic historicism. The author discusses the impact of Aristotelianism on the Middle Ages, such as the Scholastics, and the authoritarianism of the Medieval Church, which culminated with the Inquisition. After this, Popper demystifies the work of Hegel because he views this philosopher as the source of 20th-century totalitarian movements. He evaluates Hegel’s working relationship with the powerful Prussian state, his well-known dialectical triad, the philosophy of identity, and his historicism.

The final section of the second volume discusses Marx and addresses four subject areas, “Marx’s Method,” “Marx’s Prophecy,” “Marx’s Ethics,” and “The Aftermath.” The first two subject areas are key to understanding Marx’s system since they assess Marx’s methodology, which applies to institutional analysis and class relations under capitalism, and Marx’s historicist prophecy, which targets long-term predictions such as the establishment of a classless, stateless society. After this, the author evaluates Marx’s morality, such as his genuine concern for the working class, the tension between Marxist political activism and the historicist notion of political impotence, and his ethical impact on Christian movements. The final section addresses broad-scale issues, such as the sociology of knowledge and the relationship between rationality and irrationality.

Despite living in different environments, Plato, Hegel, and Marx shared interest in a number of key themes. One of them is historicism. Popper is very critical of this trajectory because it reduces history to destiny and subordinates the individual to sweeping historic events by removing one’s agency and responsibility. Plato subscribed to historicism by offering historic periodization based on the idea of change, which he viewed as corruption by losing the ideal Form—the Golden Age. Hegel also used historicist periodization by finding the expression of history through its Spirit. Marx used economic historicism to predict—incorrectly—the inevitability of a social revolution, followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the gradual disappearance of classes and the state itself.

Another key issue is totalitarianism. With Plato, Popper locates the Greek philosopher’s totalitarian tendencies in his advocacy for an all-powerful state led by the philosopher-king, a rigid class system without social mobility, and resistance to social change of any kind. Concerning Hegel, Popper believes that this German philosopher used his dialectics to transform ideas into their opposites, such as his intellectual efforts to undermine establishing a constitution, and his historicist assertion that might is right—both used to support the powerful Prussian state. The author also locates the link between Hegelianism and modern totalitarianism, for instance, in the way in which racialist fascists replaced the Hegelian Spirit as the driving force in history with blood (race). With Marx, Popper identifies the way his historicist prophecy was used as an ideology to establish the powerful state of the USSR, which was the opposite of his prediction about the disappearance of the state.

Popper does not simply stop at criticizing these three central philosophers but also offers constructive solutions to the problems discussed in this book. For instance, the author posits liberal democracy as an optimal form of government and the preferred foundation for the further development of an open society. He also advocates for strategic state interventionism in matters of the economy to prevent corporate exploitation. His most important suggestion is in favor of gradual change—piecemeal social engineering—instead of the radical social reconstruction proposed by Plato, Hegel, and Marx. A contemporary of the Second World, The Open Society and Its Enemies continues to be an important work for students and scholars of humanities and social sciences alike. It distills complex philosophical ideas into an accessible format and addresses a number of subjects that remain relevant on a global scale.