The Open Society and Its Enemies
Written in New Zealand exile while Nazism consumed Europe, Popper's attack on Plato, Hegel, and Marx as proto-totalitarians and his defense of liberal democracy as the only society that allows for peaceful correction of mistakes became the intellectual foundation of post-WWII liberalism.
Readers who know Hegel's actual texts are harshest, calling those chapters “one of the most mind-numbingly bad readings of Hegel,” assembled from decontextualised quotation, one critic likening the method to citing “quotes from various historical texts claiming they were evidence of bigfoot.” Popper announces up front that he has no intention of giving Plato an even hearing, and current scholarship treats his reading as “generally regarded as a cartoonish misinterpretation of Plato.” Volume two's Marx material is soft where volume one was relentless, and he never pins down what an open society concretely requires. Detractors sum it up as “two and a half anti-democratic thinkers and a horde of strawmen,” “more a work of catharsis than explanation,” in which “Popper clearly becomes victim of his own critique”; one would only “recommend to people who have been personally victimised by Platonists.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
