A great classic, although everything past chapter XX does not add to what previously said

Der zweite Band steht dem ersten in nichts nach und liefert erneut eine reichhaltige Analyse von Feinden der offenen Gesellschaft.

Popper beschäftigt sich fundiert und differenziert mit den besten Gegenargumenten gegen seine Position und würdigt seine Gegner, wo es angebracht ist. Davon könnten sich viele eine dicke Scheibe abschneiden. Ein paar bissige Bemerkungen gegenüber Hegel kann er sich nicht verkneifen, doch mit seiner Voreingenommenheit geht Popper offen und ehrlich um.

Seine Analysen sind wie schon in Band 1 ausladend und extrem lehrreich, wenn man verstehen will, wie Feindschaft gegenüber der offenen Gesellschaft entsteht und wie sie funktioniert. Ein Muss für alle, die sich in der Tiefe mit Politik, Demokratie und der dahinterstehenden Philosophie beschäftigen wollen!

It's difficult to summarize such a vast and extraordinarily detailed book. It's like reading the rules of a compiler and then reviewing all of the code which it might improve. There are possibly infinite applications.

O segundo volume de "A Sociedade Aberta e os Seus Inimigos" foi publicado em 1943. Primeiramente, Popper busca identificar a influência do essencialismo de Aristóteles sobre o historicismo de Hegel. Em seguida, Popper faz uma crítica agressiva contra Hegel: ele teria recuperado as ideias totalizantes de Platão contra a liberdade e razão prática. Para Popper, Hegel seria o elo entre Platão e o totalitarismo moderno e um grande ludibriador intelectual (conforme Schopenhauer indicara).
Em seguida, Popper trata do método de Marx. Em Marx, é possível encontrar um pensamento rígido e determinista para identificar os rumos da sociedade. Apesar de acertadamente
Marx ter aceitado a autonomia da sociologia em relação ao psicologismo, Popper explica que ele reduziu a história às relações econômicas simplificando as relações de classe e a tomada de consciência ou de pertencimento humano ao pensamento classista.
A partir disso, conforme demonstra Popper, Marx entendeu que as políticas reformistas estatais eram impotentes, sendo necessária uma revolução e a consequente quebra do Estado. Com o tempo, o próprio marxismo posterior a Marx passou a defender a necessidade de um Estado presente para lidar com questões sociais, ainda que não tenha notado o perigo do intervencionismo para a liberdade.
Popper apresenta os três passos de Marx para o socialismo: 1) crítica da economia capitalista e das relações de classe; 2) a inevitabilidade de uma revolução; 3) a emergência de uma sociedade sem classes. Popper argumenta que da primeira premissa não se pode derivar a segunda e a terceira afirmação. Para Popper, a sugestão de Marx levou a uma fé cega no curso da história e representou uma ameaça a uma sociedade aberta.
Por fim, na análise da ética de Marx, Popper identifica uma crítica ao capitalismo e à religião, como também a redução da moral à história e à consciência de classe. Para Popper, o marxismo científico está morto, de modo que o que sobrou foi um ímpeto humanitarista social.
Na análise de Popper, a retórica ludibriadora de Hegel é mais ameaçadora do que o pensamento de Marx.

This book is a classic of political thinking. It offers a compelling answer against all kind of totalitarian ideas.
Before reading I've never noticed that the totalitarian tendencies were founded by Platon. The contempt of Hegel felt by many liberal thinkers i could not understand......however an instinctive refusal of marxism i did feel all the time.

It's a strong plea for liberty and reason. One of the most convincing sentences was, that we are not all equal but all entitled to equal rights.

However as every good book about liberty it leaves the question unanswered how to use freedom and to live in the Open Society.
It only shows us what answers we have to avoid.

Pretty good rant about Hegel, certainly a worthwhile perspective to have read, trying to explain Hegel's lack of accessibility with "Because he was a crazy nutjob who fooled his authoritarian benefactors, or otherwise rationalized their agenda". A bit polemic, sure. But important nonetheless.

The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx.

I liked this book, though not as much as the first volume. Though that probably has a lot to do with having read much of Plato while having read very little of Hegel and Marx. One thing that bothered me a bit here was how Popper never really gives a very good justification for his morality of interventionism and his take on humanitarianism. He asserts, often enough, that we have moral duties to help those in need, for example, without providing much of a defense for why we should. I do not share his views on this and it often made me roll my eyes. Overall however, the book provided a good overview of Marx. And the treatment of Hegel was very much well deserved (his Philosophy of History was bombastic emptyness and stank of statism). His rather vague stance on interventionism was also a head scratcher. It was as if he did not fully see the dangers of state interventionism and of the general failures of this sort of "engineering," despite discussions on unforseen consequences. Here Hayek is a better authority.

As someone mentioned, Volume 2 was more labored, though I dont think it was because Marx is more complex than Plato, I dont thinki he is.

"The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx by Karl Raimund Popper (1971)"

Popper at his best!

Pertinent to my review of Book I of this series, Sir Karl in this issuance delves into two German pure philosophers of renown and repute - as intellectual extensions of their master, Plato the Attic philosopher.

With no malice at all towards Marx in particular, with accolades being thrown to his personal kindness and good intentions, and self-imposed poverty (though he does point out in ancillary form to Hegel's being known in effect as [a] "flat headed... be-fouler of young men's minds") Sir Karl with much teacher-like proscription shows how clouded or even preoccupied Marx's judgement and analyses are with Plato's (antiquated assumptions?) that men are capable of a common mind beyond that of the individual. And that philosopher kings (that well-known benign monarch who patronizes all) can indeed have all the knowledge of the individuals without them being so-concerned, as societal operands: and so forth. In fine, other than making a plea for the masses continually revolting to overthrow what is presumably an ever-growing grass blade of owner-class oppression, the great Marx does not allow for the continual murder and intrigue realistically generated by the mighty winners of the the continuous class struggle. In effect, these are carbon-copies, states Sir Karl, of Plato's 40 Tyrants.

What is unwritten yet posited inside of all this - from Book I to II - is something akin to Julian Jaynes's assumption that somewhere around the time of Jesus Christ, the human mind progressed (became bicameral) and that, in spite of its staying power, the works of Plato regarding the human mind and political structures is ancient and conservative if not both - no matter how many times a Platonist philosopher might call a movement "new."

The fear among those in a presumably "open society" is that such ancient dragons of thought are constantly afoot to disabuse those in such a happy state of their notions of being able to lead themselves without a Great Person and their Ruling Clique (which ties in quite nicely hack to Socrates, the needle being threaded somewhere through Jesus Christ, to the signatories of the Magna Carta, the partakers in the Glorious Revolution and thenceforward towards the the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution). Therein be the dragons.

This is terrific and brave thinking and writing.

It's a great joy to read Popper, with his clear and well-formed prose and his rational and practical ideas.
In the second part of the Open Society and its Enemies (such as tribalists, authoritarians, relativists and anti-rationalists) Popper again develops his views on politics by a severely critical assessment of the views of famous philosophers. But there are differences. In the first part Plato was his main victim, but while abhorring his political ideas, Popper retains his respect for Plato more generally. In fact he says Plato betrayed his own humanitarian principles. In the second part Popper's victim is Hegel, and he completely destroys him by, following Schopenhauer, exposing him as an obscurantist and a charlatan payed by his government to argue that the most recent embodiment of his Idealist World Spirit was the Prussian State. His interpretation of world history as a dialectic of Ideas that were expressed in the world of matter as struggles between nation-states paved the way for totalitarian ideologies. The Marxists replaced the nation-state with socio-economic class, and the Fascists replaced it with blood, or race. Many quotes by Hegel that Popper gives immediately bring Hitler's 'weltanschauung' to mind. To Hegel's defence must be said (and Popper says this himself too) that most of his ideas were not original. They were in the air at the time, and date back to the French Enlighteners: the Rousseau/Robespierre/Romanticism branch. Hegel's original idea was his version of the Socratic dialectic: thesis vs. antithesis leading to a synthesis, which contained the inner contradictions leading to a new opposition between a thesis and its antithesis, and so on. Up to this point this is a useful idea according to Popper, resembling the way science works. Where however Hegel says this results in a progressing series of stages or steps towards an ultimate goal of complete freedom and self-consciousness of the Absolute Spirit, that is expressed in matter as a Utopian society of a certain kind, Popper disagrees and calls it Historicism.

The next in line is Marx. But Marx gets a good report as an honest man who wanted to improve the harsh lot of workers in the days of laissez-faire capitalism, but did this in the wrong manner. Namely by a prophecy, a historicist theory: the supposed existence of historical/material laws that lead automatically to a promised land and classless society with happy people free of hard work and a State which had become useless and had withered away. Marx turned Hegel upside down and replaced Spirit with Matter. It was man's external metabolism (as Marx called it) with nature, his means of production, that determined a 'superstructure' of social relations, law, politics and ultimately man's consciousness.

Of course according to Marx political action is not necessary. It can at most lessen the 'birth pangs' of the Utopian society that is necessarily brought about by the inexorable historical-economic laws of motion of society (technological development leading to increased productivity of labour and accumulation of capital). His followers however believed in large-scale social planning by the blue-print method. It's one of Popper's most important ideas that these nearly always fail, due to the inherent unpredictability of the future and the unforeseen, unintended consequences of all human action, including those plans, making them obsolete even when they are still being carried out.

The right way is piece-meal social engineering. Identifying concrete problems and solve them. And the right political system is not unrestrained capitalism, and not a totalitarian, centrally planned state but what in Europe is called a social democracy. A system in which all power is democratically controlled by institutions and practices economic interventionism. In fact this is what the industrial nations gradually evolved into, without revolutions, refuting Marx's theory.