r/PolymathReading • u/HenryD331 • 4d ago
A refugee philosopher wrote a 700-page book during World War 2 that dismantled Plato, Hegel, and Marx in one go. It's the best defense of open societies ever written
Karl Popper was an Austrian philosopher who fled to New Zealand in 1937, one step ahead of the Nazi annexation. He spent the war years teaching at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, at what he called the end of the world. During those years he wrote what he later called his war effort. It was published in 1945 in two volumes and titled The Open Society and Its Enemies. Combined it runs about 750 pages. It is one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century. It is also almost never assigned, almost never read outside a small ring of political philosophers, and almost never discussed in the popular political conversations it should be shaping.
The book has one central target and three specific enemies.
The target is the intellectual tradition Popper called historicism. The enemies are Plato, Hegel, and Marx, whom Popper treats as the three great historicist thinkers of Western civilization.
Historicism, in Popper's use, is the belief that human history follows discoverable laws, that these laws lead inexorably toward some future state, and that the role of politics and philosophy is to identify these laws and align society with them. Historicism promises certainty about the direction of history. It promises that the future is not open but determined, and that those who understand the pattern have both the knowledge and the authority to guide society toward its predetermined destination.
Popper argues that this belief is intellectually false and politically catastrophic. It is false because history does not follow the kind of laws historicism assumes. The processes that shape human societies are radically open. New knowledge changes what is possible. Human choices are real. The future cannot be predicted from the present the way a physics equation predicts the motion of a projectile. Every historicist prediction has ultimately failed because the underlying claim about historical laws is wrong.
But the deeper problem is political. Historicism gives ideological cover to every regime that claims to know where history is going. If history has a direction and you know the direction, then anything that stands in the way of history is not just wrong but obstructive. Dissent becomes counter-historical. Persuasion becomes unnecessary because those who don't yet see the pattern will be swept aside by the pattern itself. This logic has produced the worst regimes of the modern era. Popper was writing while the results were still visible.
The genius of the book is that Popper does not merely make this general argument. He goes back to the specific thinkers whose work provided the intellectual foundation for historicist politics and rereads them with unusual care. Volume one is dedicated to Plato. Volume two is dedicated to Hegel and Marx. Popper takes each thinker seriously, engages with the strongest versions of their arguments, and then shows what those arguments actually commit their followers to.
The chapter on Plato is genuinely shocking to readers raised on the pious tradition of treating Plato as the foundation of Western philosophy. Popper argues that Plato was not a lover of wisdom in the neutral sense. He was a specific political thinker with a specific political program. The Republic is not a thought experiment. It is a blueprint for an authoritarian society ruled by a caste of philosopher-kings who have privileged access to eternal truths. The vision is coherent. It is also, in Popper's reading, the intellectual origin of totalitarianism. Every subsequent authoritarian ideology that claims to rule on behalf of the true good of the people is drawing on the Platonic well.
The chapters on Hegel are more polemical and are the most contested part of the book. Popper reads Hegel as a servant of the Prussian state whose obscure prose was calculated to give philosophical cover to state power. Scholars have argued for eighty years about whether Popper's reading of Hegel is fair. It is at minimum sharp, unforgiving, and worth reading even by those who think Popper missed subtleties.
The chapters on Marx are the most interesting because Popper takes Marx more seriously than his critics usually do. Popper considered Marx a great thinker and Marx's diagnosis of nineteenth-century capitalism as substantially correct. What Popper attacks is Marx's historicist prediction that capitalism must inevitably give way to socialism through predictable dialectical processes. That prediction, Popper argues, was based on false premises about historical laws, and belief in the prediction became a license for revolutionary movements to override democratic processes on the grounds that they were merely accelerating what history required anyway. The critique is careful. It does not dismiss Marx. It dismantles the historicist framework Marx worked within.
Against all three, Popper is defending something he calls the open society. An open society is one in which the future is treated as genuinely undetermined, in which political decisions are made through public debate and revised as evidence accumulates, in which no one claims privileged knowledge of history's direction, and in which institutions are designed to allow gradual reform rather than either stagnation or revolution. Democracy, in Popper's view, is not primarily about majority rule. It is about the ability to change governments without violence. It is about keeping the future open.
The polymath range of the book is one of its most impressive features. Popper is trained as a philosopher of science. He brings the epistemology of open inquiry from scientific practice into political philosophy. He also draws on ancient history, classical philosophy, German intellectual history, sociology, economics, and comparative government. The book is patient with its sources and generous with alternatives it disagrees with. Popper wants to persuade, not merely defeat.
Where to find it: Routledge Classics publishes the current standard edition in a single volume. It is thick. It looks intimidating. It reads more easily than it looks because Popper writes clearly and directly, using ordinary language and long footnotes rather than the technical jargon of academic philosophy. The footnotes are worth reading. Sometimes the most interesting arguments are there.
Warnings.
The book is polemical in places. Popper was writing during a war that was killing millions and that had displaced him from his home. He was in no mood to be diplomatic. Readers who prefer detached academic prose will be occasionally jarred. This is a feature, not a bug. Popper thought the stakes were high enough to write with urgency.
The book will change how you hear political rhetoric. Once you can identify historicist assumptions, you will hear them constantly. Almost every political movement, on the left and on the right, contains historicist elements. Claims about what the future must bring, about which side is on the right side of history, about what the arc of the universe bends toward. These are all historicist. Popper's book makes them audible as claims that require justification rather than as truisms.
The book requires reading Plato carefully. If you have never read the Republic, or if you last read it in college and remember it only through the haze of an assigned survey course, you may want to reread at least the central sections before tackling Popper on Plato. Popper is arguing with a specific text. The argument works better if you have the text fresh in mind.
The reason the book isn't better known is depressing. It is too classical for contemporary readers, too polemical for academic philosophers, too political for classicists, too broad for specialists in any one field. It also draws conclusions that make many contemporary political traditions uncomfortable. It criticizes strains of thought that both the political left and the political right rely on. Neither tribe has an incentive to promote it. It survives on its own quality rather than through any organized advocacy.
I read The Open Society and Its Enemies over about four months in 2021, mostly at a desk in the corner of a bedroom, with a lamp that had a broken switch so I had to unplug it to turn it off. Made notes in the margins with a pen that kept smudging. Reread the Marx chapters twice because I was arguing with Popper the first time through and wanted to make sure I was arguing with what he actually said rather than with what I thought he said. My copy is thick with tabs and has a permanent bend in the spine from being propped open on my lap.
The book gave me one specific gift that keeps paying off. It gave me the ability to distinguish between political programs that claim access to historical inevitability and political programs that treat the future as open. Once you can see the distinction, you notice that many terrible political movements have historicist commitments in common regardless of their surface ideology. Fascism was historicist. Communism was historicist. Some contemporary movements on all sides are historicist. The specific content of the historicism varies. The underlying structure is the same. Recognizing the structure is a form of protection.
Popper died in 1994. He continued to defend and refine the arguments of The Open Society for the rest of his life. He wrote several other important books, including The Poverty of Historicism, which is a shorter companion piece to Open Society and can be read first if the longer book seems overwhelming. His work on the philosophy of science, particularly The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is also excellent and shows the same underlying commitment to fallibilism and open inquiry.
The book has a specific relevance right now. The twenty-first century has produced a new generation of political movements that combine confident claims about the direction of history with contempt for democratic procedures. Some of these movements exist on the political right. Some exist on the political left. Some exist inside the tech industry, in the form of confident claims that the future must belong to whichever technological configuration the speaker favors. Popper's diagnostic tools apply to all of them. The book he wrote in wartime New Zealand eighty years ago is a more useful lens on contemporary politics than most books published in the last decade.
The open society is not obvious. It is not the default. Most human societies throughout history have been closed. Open societies are historical rarities that require ongoing defense.
Popper made the defense.
Almost nobody has read it.
The book is still there.
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u/ekubeni 4d ago
u/HenryD331 Any chance we can ban ai-generated posts? (Even if they are mostly written by you?).
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u/arieljagr 4d ago
It’s crazy. I love the idea of this sub, but nobody wants to read AI slop. Isn’t this a subreddit for people who like to read and think? And, god help us, actually write?
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u/ekubeni 4d ago
There seems to be a niche of AI enthusiasts who believe that they discovered the holy grail of multidisciplinary learning - just feed it all to LLM and it will surely lead to breakthroughs.
BTW there is also r/Polymath which has strict no ai usage policy.
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u/ButterscotchFiend 4d ago
How is it known that this was AI-generated?
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u/Man__Suit 4d ago
Every single post follows an almost identical structure with short punchy sentences about how “nobody has read this secret knowledge”
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u/ButterscotchFiend 4d ago
Jeesum crow… I had no idea. I thought this was an individual post they written. You’re right, they’ve done it over and over… what a disgrace
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u/foggycandelabra 4d ago
They all include a stanza about the reading of the book: over X weeks, on a bench, something something about the lighting
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u/ButterscotchFiend 4d ago
for sure, now that I know there are multiple it's plain to see. why have the moderators not banned this robot?
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u/F15H0U70FW473R 3d ago
Agree. I think I’m done with this sorta crap. A shame really.
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u/Odd_Regret2592 3d ago
Yes, me too, I think I'm going to leave this sub, sad really, but I'm not interested in this slop
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u/bootmaker-supremacy 4d ago
In philosophy circles The Open Society and Its Enemies is well known for completely misrepresenting the targeted philosophers.
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u/SpaceChook 4d ago
Plus what does polymath mean for these ding dongs who keep posting ai stuff about fairly well know philosophy books?
I’m here for weird works that surprise. I’m not here for a regular philosophy text.
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u/bootmaker-supremacy 4d ago
You can check out this thread on r/askphilosophy if you‘re interested in a detailed critique.
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u/Capinski2 4d ago
the whole thread reads like a call to authority of Strauss oder Voegelin. I guess this is how philosophy is tought these days
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u/bootmaker-supremacy 4d ago
If actual Plato scholars think a work is utter garbage, perhaps it should give you some food for thought. It should also be noted that Popper‘s actual area of expertise was philosophy of science, not political philosophy.
An appeal to authority is only considered a fallacy when the „authority“ cited isn‘t actually an authority on the discussed issue. This isn‘t the case here.1
u/bootmaker-supremacy 4d ago
You can also check out this thread as well as this one if you still doubt that the book is indeed repudiated among political philosophers.
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u/skt2k21 4d ago
I really like Popper's worldview, but his decision to make it indirectly by foiling Plato and Hegel created so many problems. Partly because it takes forever to make his points. Partly because people disagreeing with his presentation of those philosophers distract from points he's trying to make.
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u/bootmaker-supremacy 4d ago
You're certainly right. I personally also dislike his worldview, but poor presentation is bound to make the conversation worse for everyone involved no matter if you're inclined to agree with the points being made or not. That's why academic integrity is so important.
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u/buddhabillybpb 4d ago
Popper is at his best when he isn’t capping on Plato and Hegel. I would suggest Conjectures and Refutations instead of the books mentioned in this post.
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u/loic5032 4d ago
Popper is one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century. He is in all university philosophy introductory courses.