The Open Society and Its Enemies: New One-Volume Edition by Karl Popper, ISBN-13: 978-0691158136
[PDF eBook eTextbook]
- Publisher: Princeton University Press; New edition (April 21, 2013)
- Language: English
- 808 pages
- ISBN-10: 0691158134
- ISBN-13: 978-0691158136
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.
Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION BY ALAN RYAN ix
‘PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE OPEN SOCIETY ‘
BY E.H. GOMBRICH xxiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxxv
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xxxvii
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxxix
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION xli
VOLUME I: THE SPELL OF PLATO 1
The Myth of Origin and Destiny 5
1 Historicism and the Myth of Destiny 7
2 Heraclitus 10
3 Plato’s Theory of Forms or Ideas 17
Plato’s Descriptive Sociology 33
4 Change and Rest 35
5 Nature and Convention 55
Plato’s Political Programme 81
6 Totalitarian Justice 83
7 The Principle of Leadership 114
8 The Philosopher King 130
9 Aestheticism, Perfectionism, Utopianism 147
The Background of Plato’s Attack 159
10 The Open Society and Its Enemies 161
Addenda (1957, 1961, 1965) 190
VOLUME II: THE HIGH TIDE OF PROPHECY 213
The Rise of Oracular Philosophy 217
11 The Aristotelian Roots of Hegelianism 219
12 Hegel and the New Tribalism 242
Marx’s Method 291
13 Marx’s Sociological Determinism 293
14 The Autonomy of Sociology 301
15 Economic Historicism 311
16 The Classes 321
17 The Legal and the Social System 327
Marx’s Prophecy 343
18 The Coming of Socialism 345
19 The Social Revolution 355
20 Capitalism and Its Fate 373
21 An Evaluation of the Prophecy 397
Marx’s Ethics 403
22 The Moral Theory of Historicism 405
The Aftermath 417
23 The Sociology of Knowledge 419
24 Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason 430
Conclusion 463
25 Has History Any Meaning? 465
Addenda (1961, 1965) 485
NOTES 512
NOTES TO VOLUME I 514
NOTES TO VOLUME II 640
INDEX 735
Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His books include The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Poverty of Historicism, Conjectures and Refutations, The Open Society and Its Enemies and an autobiography, Unended Quest. He was a professor at the London School of Economics.
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