Free PDF The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato, by Karl R. Popper
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The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato, by Karl R. Popper
Free PDF The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato, by Karl R. Popper
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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.
In the book, Popper condemned Plato, Marx, and Hegel as "holists" and "historicists"--a holist, according to Popper, believes that individuals are formed entirely by their social groups; historicists believe that social groups evolve according to internal principles that it is the intellectual's task to uncover. Popper, by contrast, held that social affairs are unpredictable, and argued vehemently against social engineering. He also sought to shift the focus of political philosophy away from questions about who ought to rule toward questions about how to minimize the damage done by the powerful. The book was an immediate sensation, and--though it has long been criticized for its portrayals of Plato, Marx, and Hegel--it has remained a landmark on the left and right alike for its defense of freedom and the spirit of critical inquiry.
- Sales Rank: #359992 in Books
- Published on: 1971-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.53" h x 1.00" w x 5.54" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
'One of the great books of the century' - Alan Ryan, The Times
'Few philosophershave combined such a vast width of knowledge with the capacity to produce important original ideas as he did.' - Anthony Quinton, The Guardian
'This is a work of great interest and significance, stimulating and suggestive throughout. Dr Popper's virtues are manifold. He has a great fertility of ideas. Almost every sentence gives us something to think about.' - G.C. Field, Philosophy
From the Back Cover
'A work of first-class importance which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the enemies of democracy, ancient and modern.'-Bertrand Russell
About the Author
Karl Popper (1902-1994). Philosopher, born in Vienna. One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Essential reading for everyone interested in democracy.
By D. R. Schryer
Karl Popper was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. In The Open Society and It's Enemies he presents not only the case for democracy (an open society) but also the case against tyranny (a closed society), no matter how benevolent any given tyranny purports to be. Popper also explains why many people are still attracted to tyranical forms of government -- whether fascist or communist. Such people prefer order to freedom. One of the paradoxes presented by Popper is that some degree of inefficiency is endemic to democracy, whereas highly-efficient government -- which many people think they want -- is almost invariably tyrannical. This book is a must read for everyone interested in maintaining individual freedom and understanding the threats which it constantly faces.
28 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Refuting Plato
By Vincent Poirier
Popper wrote this book for me and for people like me, i.e. for people who stand in awe of Plato simply because he is Plato.
I read Plato's Republic in 1985 or thereabouts. I had learned of the allegory of the cave in class and wanted to know more. Also, in one M*A*S*H episode, the Republic was among the books Frank Burns was burning, so of course I had to read it. I did, and apart from Book One's denunciation of the maxim "Might Makes Right", I felt uneasy about the rest of the work. At the time, I felt that there must have been something wrong with me, that I wasn't reading it right, that after all having stood the test of time for over two thousand years Plato simply couldn't be wrong. If only I had known of Popper in 1985!
Popper is in many ways pointing out the obvious: that Emperor Plato is wearing no clothes. His Republic is nothing more than a totalitarian state and his value system represses the individual in favour of the State.
Popper begins by describing what he calls "Historicism" or the belief that history develops according to laws from which the future could be predicted, with Heraclitus being the first "historicist". Popper then continues with an overview Plato's thought, especially his Theory of Forms and his brilliant sociological insights. He then exposes over three chapters Plato's political programme to bring about a perfect City-State, and here is where Popper points out the obvious: Plato's Republic is a totalitarian state that controls every facet of the lives of all its citizens and represses any every invidual path to happiness.
In the last chapter, Popper sketches out how an Open Society would work and gives the example of Athens just before Plato. Unlike others who have savaged Plato (e.g. Ayn Rand) Popper doesn't lay out a master plan to replace Plato's. He doesn't believe in utopias, Platonic or otherwise. Popper believes in what he calls "Piecemeal Social Engineering" i.e. fixing problems as they come up, or improving institutions when the opportunity arises.
This is Popper's Open Society. One where we accept that things are as they are, that they can be improved, that individuals are the only judges of their own happiness and that they should have complete freedom to pursue it as they see fit, insofar as they don't harm others too much. His test for an Open Society is very simple: a society is open if its government can change without bloodshed.
In 1948, Scott Buchanan wrote, in the introduction to Penguin's Portable Plato, that "the reading of Plato's dialogues by a large number of people could make the difference between a century of folly and a century of wisdom for the world". Perhaps, but only if the reader approches Plato without awe and with a critical mind. As did Popper.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
37 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Portrait of the Philosopher-King as an Artist
By Etienne RP
When confronted with the rise of totalitarianism and the destruction of all that he held dear, Poper felt a single, overwhelming urge: to return to the Greeks, to the dawn of our civilization, so as to understand the root of the evil and to offer a practical way out of bestiality. His search was motivated by the insight that "this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth--the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society', which sets free the critical powers of man."
Heraclitus set the stage with his claim that "the cosmos, at best, is like a rubbish heap scattered at random." If "everything is in flux" and "you cannot step twice into the same river", then at least we can try to discover the historical or evolutionary laws which will enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.
Plato's claim to greatness is to have discovered such a law: that "all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration," and that the only way to break this cycle of decay is to arrest development and return to the Golden Age, where no change occurs. His belief in perfect and unchanging things, the Platonic Ideas from which all things originate, finds its expression in all fields of inquiry: be it social justice, nature and convention, wisdom and truth, or goodness and beauty.
Behind these lofty ideals, Popper uncovers a discomforting truth: Plato envisioned the ideal Greek polity as a totalitarian nightmare, where the 'race of the guardians' had to be kept pure from any miscegenation and where the role of the rulers was to breed the human cattle according to some esoteric formula (the 'Platonic Number', a number determining the True Period of the human race). Along his apology of Sparta came his endorsement of infanticide and his recommendation that children of both sexes be "brought within the sight of actual war and made to taste blood."
Popper demonstrates that these crazy ideas were not the vague mumblings of an otherwise sound philosopher: they were central tenets in Plato's philosophy, a system which has been characterized by another author as "the most savage and most profound attack upon liberal ideas which history can show."
Popper connects this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach with its aestheticism, i.e. with "the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness." Plato, the Philosopher-King, can be best characterized as an artist: a man attracted to a world of pure beauty, a craftsman who tries to visualize an ideal model of his work and to copy it faithfully, and for whom "the part has to be executed for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of the part." His desire to "start from a clean canvas" or his claim to prefer "the original to the copy" find disturbing echoes in contemporary political debates. Contrary to Plato's belief, however, the canvas can never be made clean, and the copy often improves upon the original.
Let's give Popper the last word: "But there I must protest. I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material."
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