Treasures of the Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University: The Open Society and Its Enemies

The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is the book The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.

The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Karl Popper.

Karl Popper was an Austrian philosopher, academic and social commentator.

In political discourse, he is known for his defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible.

His political thought was associated with Enlightenment rationalism and humanism.

Born in Vienna. Popper was an opponent of totalitarianism, nationalism, fascism, romanticism, collectivism, and other reactionary and irrational ideas, and identified modern liberal democracies as the best embodiment of an open society.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is a work on political philosophy.

Written during World War II, The Open Society and Its Enemies was published in 1945 in London.

The book defends the open society and liberal democracy.

Popper argues that Plato’s political philosophy has dangerous tendencies towards totalitarianism. He praises Plato’s analysis of social change but rejects his solutions, which he sees as driven by fear of change brought about by the rise of democracies, and as contrary to the humanitarian and democratic views of Socrates and other thinkers of the Athenian “Great Generation”.

Popper also criticizes Hegel, tracing his ideas to Aristotle and arguing that they were at the root of 20th century totalitarianism.

He agrees with Schopenhauer’s view that Hegel “was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.”

Popper criticizes Marx for his radical and revolutionary outlook.

Popper advocates for direct liberal democracy as the only form of government that allows institutional improvements without violence and bloodshed.

Here are some brief excerpts from The Open Society and Its Enemies, as posted online:

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.

But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal […]

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure […]

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings […]

Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all; and further, that unavoidable suffering—such as hunger in times of an unavoidable shortage of food—should be distributed as equally as possible […]

Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought whatever, then you cannot do better than give him Hegel to read. For these monstrous accumulations of words that annul and contradict one another drive the mind into tormenting itself with vain attempts to think anything whatever in connection with them, until finally it collapses from sheer exhaustion. Thus any ability to think is so thoroughly destroyed that the young man will ultimately mistake empty and hollow verbiage for real thought. A guardian fearing that his ward might become too intelligent for his schemes might prevent this misfortune by innocently suggesting the reading of Hegel […]

I wish to make it clear that ‘history’ in the sense in which most people speak of it simply does not exist; and this is at least one reason why I say that it has no meaning […]

The fascist appeal to ‘human nature’ is to our passions, to our collectivist mystical needs, to ‘man the unknown’. Adopting Hegel’s words just quoted, this appeal may be called the cunning of the revolt against reason. But the height of this cunning is reached by Hegel in this boldest dialectical twist of his. While paying lip-service to rationalism, while talking more loudly about ‘reason’ than any man before or after him, he ends up in irrationalism; in an apotheosis not only of passion, but of brutal force: ‘It is’, Hegel writes, ‘the absolute interest of Reason that this Moral Whole’ (i.e. the State) ‘should exist; and herein lies the justification and merit of heroes, the founders of States—however cruel they may have been … Such men may treat other great and even sacred interests inconsiderately … But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower; it must crush to pieces many an object on its path […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)