By Karl Popper
A defence of liberal democracy against historicism.
Subject
Themes
Written in exile in New Zealand while fascism consumed Europe, this two-volume work is one of the twentieth century's most sustained defences of liberal democracy against the intellectual traditions that Popper believed had prepared the ground for totalitarianism.
Written in exile in New Zealand while fascism consumed Europe, this two-volume work is one of the twentieth century's most sustained defences of liberal democracy against the intellectual traditions that Popper believed had prepared the ground for totalitarianism. The argument begins with a…
Karl Popper began writing this book in 1938, the year that Germany absorbed Austria in the Anschluss. He was living in New Zealand, where he had taken a teaching post in 1937, having read the signs of what was coming to Central Europe accurately enough to leave before the disaster arrived. He wrote…
At the heart of the argument about what went wrong in the twentieth century lies a diagnosis that is simultaneously historical, philosophical, and political. The catastrophes of fascism and Stalinism were not primarily the products of economic failure, national humiliation, or the psychology of mass…
The defence of democracy offered here is deliberately negative, and this is not a weakness but a philosophical strength. The question most often asked about democracy is: why should the majority rule? And the most obvious answers turn out to be unsatisfactory. The majority is not always wise.…
Totalitarianism in the political sense, the mobilisation of all social resources toward a single end under the control of a single authority, has a philosophical twin: the belief that society can be perfectly designed. These two things reinforce each other. If perfect social design is possible, then…
The political argument and the epistemological argument are not parallel but the same argument, stated in two different registers. The case for the open society is simultaneously a case about how knowledge grows and a case about how institutions should be designed. If knowledge is certain, then…
One of the most important and most frequently misunderstood arguments in the book concerns the relationship between freedom and state power. The argument is not libertarian. It does not hold that state intervention is inherently bad or that markets left to themselves produce just outcomes. It holds…
Historicism is one of the oldest and most tenacious tendencies in human thought: the belief that history obeys discoverable laws, and that these laws allow the prediction of humanity's future. In its ancient form, the doctrine of the chosen people holds that God has singled out a particular nation…
One of the most consequential ideas the ancient Greeks bequeathed to later thought is the distinction between nature and convention: between the way things simply are and the rules human societies have chosen to establish. The Sophists drew a radical conclusion from this: if social institutions are…
The contrast between two approaches to political change runs through the entire first volume, and it receives its sharpest formulation here. Utopian social engineering appears systematic: define the ultimate aim first, draw up a blueprint of the ideal society, and direct all effort toward realising…
Marx was not a crude propagandist. He was a man of genuine intellectual honesty, burning humanitarian concern, and real scientific ambition. He had a distrust of moralising that distinguished him from his sentimental socialist predecessors, and he took seriously the demand that social analysis…
Marx's theory of the state defines it as an instrument of class rule. The government is a committee managing the collective interests of the bourgeoisie; democracy is bourgeois dictatorship dressed in the language of freedom. From this theory follows a politically disastrous conclusion: political…
The verdict on Marx's prophetic system is mixed. He got some important things right: unrestrained capitalism would not last; the trade cycle was an endemic problem; the organisation of workers would be a major transformative force. These successes are real and worth acknowledging. But every instance…
The closing argument of the work begins with an acknowledgment that carries its own philosophical weight: the selection of subjects treated in these pages, the weight placed on certain arguments, the attention paid to Plato rather than to Aristotle's logic or to the pre-Socratics' cosmology, all…
By Karl Popper
Subject
Themes
Written in exile in New Zealand while fascism consumed Europe, this two-volume work is one of the twentieth century's most sustained defences of liberal democracy against the intellectual traditions that Popper believed had prepared the ground for totalitarianism.