WORK
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Popper's 1945 two-volume wartime masterwork — his "war effort" — that defended
liberal democracy against totalitarian ideologies by locating the difference between open and closed societies in their relationship with criticism.
The Open Society and Its Enemies is among the most influential political philosophical works of the twentieth century. Popper wrote it in New Zealand during World War II, cut off from European intellectual networks and working from memory and what library resources Canterbury College could provide. He considered it his contribution to the war effort. The two volumes —
The Spell of Plato and
The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath — attack the philosophical tradition Popper saw as the intellectual ancestor of totalitarianism: Plato's vision of the philosopher-king, Hegel's dialectical history, and Marx's claim to have discovered laws of social development. The positive thesis is that open societies are distinguished from closed societies not by their truths but by their relationship with truth — specifically, by institutions that protect the right to criticize and revise. The
paradox of tolerance appears as a footnote in Chapter 7 and has since become one of the most cited passages