MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies,1950
Published by Princeton University Press
First US edition
Collection M HKA, Antwerp

"[This book] attempts to show that this civilisation 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. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements, which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilisation and to return to tribalism.”

Karl Popper (1902-1994), the Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics, wrote The Open Society and its Enemies in New Zealand, the country he emigrated to in 1937 for fear of the emerging Nazism. The book is a head-on attack on historicism – the idea that history develops towards an end point according to fixed laws – in the thinking of philosophers Plato, Hegel and Marx. According to Popper, what he sees as their belief in a static society – the future of which can be predicted, which must be guided by a central political system, and in which the state is more important than the individual – makes them the defenders of the closed society and the spiritual fathers of communism, fascism and other ‘isms’ with an absolute truth claim.

Although Popper pays much more attention to combating what he sees as the foundations of totalitarian thinking than to clarifying his own alternative, he contrasts a closed society with an open society, in which every individual can freely participate in public debate and political decision making. Here, the rulers do not insist on a blueprint for an ideal society, but look for solutions to urgent problems and test these solutions continuously. The rulers can also be unseated and replaced in a peaceful manner. In this critical-rationalist view of politics, Popper draws striking parallels with his ideas as a philosopher of science. Some critics point out that in this way Popper ignores the emotional aspect of politics and fails to make his open society concrete and realisable, as a result of which his struggle against utopian thinking becomes itself a utopia.

The Open Society and Its Enemies still has significant influence on political philosophy and politics today. Hungarian-American businessman George Soros for example literally referred to the book when he founded the Open Society Institute in 1993, initially to support countries in Central and Eastern Europe to make the transition from communism to democratic governance, and later to promote human rights and economic, legal and social reforms worldwide. The most recent Dutch-language translation of The Open Society and Its Enemies is accompanied by an introduction by Guy Verhofstadt, former Prime Minister of Belgium and Member of the European Parliament for Flemish liberal party Open VLD.