376 pages
English language
Published Feb. 1, 1971 by Princeton University Press.
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato
by Karl Popper
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An open society provides its citizens with a mechanism for changing government; a closed society doesn't, forcing its citizens to rely on extra-legal revolution. Popper analyzes the open-closed society debate using three exemplars of closed-society advocacy: Plato, Hegel (and wow, does Popper hate on Hegel), and Marx. The main analytical viewpoints are historicist (backward-looking, utopian) motivations for closed societies and rational (forward-looking, empirical) motivations for open societies.
An open society provides its citizens with a mechanism for changing government; a closed society doesn't, forcing its citizens to rely on extra-legal revolution. Popper analyzes the open-closed society debate using three exemplars of closed-society advocacy: Plato, Hegel (and wow, does Popper hate on Hegel), and Marx. The main analytical viewpoints are historicist (backward-looking, utopian) motivations for closed societies and rational (forward-looking, empirical) motivations for open societies.