Paperback, 432 pages
English language
Published Feb. 1, 1971 by Princeton University Press.
Paperback, 432 pages
English language
Published Feb. 1, 1971 by Princeton University Press.
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.