Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Karl Popper

Today's world and its problems seem, at least at first glance, very different from those addressed by the author of "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945). Popper himself, looking back on the book only five years after its publication, was struck by the naïvete of its optimism, and the distance of his own voice (Preface to the second edition, 1950). Some of that sea-change was due to the Cold War. In turn, that period and its problems that have come to seem distant from today. Although the tone and emphasis of the book owed a lot to its time of writing (1938- 1943) and its author's aims, it turned out to be much more than a pièce d'occasion. Popper's aim at the time was to articulate those lines of division between the true friends and the true enemies of the open society that went deeper than the immediate conflict. Perhaps it was success in his chosen task that has kept the book alive for so long. Now that its author has gone, it passes to those of us stimulated by his ideas to show their continuing relevance by thinking through their application to the problems of the world today and tomorrow. Let us examine the book's relevance today by reviewing its main ideas (section 1) with a view to working them out for the present time (section 2) and, very tentatively, projecting them into the future (section 3).