The Open Society and Its Enemies

A two-volume defence of liberal democracy, written in New Zealand during the Second World War. Volume One, The Spell of Plato, reads the Republic as a blueprint for an arrested, closed society ruled by a philosopher class, and argues that Plato's historicism and holism betray the open, critical spirit of Socrates. Volume Two, The High Tide of Prophecy, criticises Hegel and then Marx, whom he charges with claiming to predict the course of history. Popper's targets are historicism, the belief that history follows discoverable laws, and utopian engineering, which tries to redesign society as a whole. Against them he offers piecemeal social engineering, which reforms institutions step by step and learns from error. He also replaces the old question of who should rule with a new one: how institutions can let the ruled remove bad rulers without bloodshed. A note in the first volume states the paradox of tolerance. Critics object that his readings of Plato and Hegel are unfair and selective.

It is a vigorous argument for democracy as a way of correcting mistakes, and its warnings about utopian politics and the paradox of tolerance remain widely cited.