The Open Society and Its Enemies: New One-Volume Edition
By Karl R. Popper, E. H. Gombrich and Alan Ryan
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One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result.
An immediate sensation when it was first published in two volumes in 1945, Popper's monumental achievement has attained legendary status on both the Left and Right and is credited with inspiring anticommunist dissidents during the Cold War. Arguing that the spirit of free, critical inquiry that governs scientific investigation should also apply to politics, Popper traces the roots of an opposite, authoritarian tendency to a tradition represented by Plato, Marx, and Hegel.
In a substantial new introduction written for this edition, acclaimed political philosopher Alan Ryan puts Popper's landmark work in biographical, intellectual, and historical context. Also included is a personal essay by eminent art historian E. H. Gombrich, in which he recounts the story of the book's eventual publication despite numerous rejections and wartime deprivations.
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Reviews for The Open Society and Its Enemies
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a must for anyone interested in politics, sociology or philosophy. It’s a full-on academic piece but worth the effort. KP exposes how fragile democracy is and how easily it can be undermined – even by those acting in its interest. His basic premise is that any society that strives to achieve some idealized goal, however honourable, will develop a totalitarian system. For democracy to survive and benefit the individual, governments must avoid “social engineering” and reserve its interventions to those aspects where the normal methods are failing. Democracy, and the Open Society, thrive only when individuals are allowed to drive the direction of societal development. Western political philosophy has been build on 2 main thinkers – Plato from Antiquity arguing for a rational organization of society, and Hegel from the modern era who provided the concept of “the people” as the moral basis of the state. Their respective systems appear to uphold the primacy of the individual in society, but their systems had inbuilt value systems in favour of particular collective ideals that eventually developed into totalitarian systems that achieved the opposite – in Plato’s case, the justification of an oppressive ruling class, and in Hegel’s case, the development of Romanticism, Nationalism and Fascism. KP argues that both thinkers had ulterior motives for their philosophies and deliberately twisted their logic to support their hidden agendas. He proceeds to uncover these twists through the use of their own arguments and shows how they were able to win over followers to their logic, cover their contradictions and have their ideas accepted for as long as they did. This is a lengthy work – 2 volumes that stretch to nearly 1,000 pages – and can be challenging to a non-academic orientated reader, but it is an important work with big ideas that is highly enlightening.
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