2 Journal of New Zealand Studies NS28 (2019), 2-28 https://doi.org/10.26686/jnzs.v0iNS28.5418 Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, and its Enemies 1 JAMES KIERSTEAD Abstract According to Michael King, Popper ’s The Open Society and Its Enemies may be “the most influential book ever to come out of New Zealand. ” Written in Christchurch in the last years of the Second World War by a Jewish intellectual in exile from Vienna, the book’s forthright attack on Plato created a storm of controversy worldwide, and continues to be influential today. In this piece, I want to reintroduce Popper to the current generation of New Zealanders. I look at how the book came to be written in New Zealand, and what Popper thought of the country. I also examine the controversy surrounding the book, and see what we might say about it today, especially in light of subsequent scholarship. “Just before his death Plato saw in a dream that he became a swan and, leaping from tree to tree, he frustrated the attempts of the bird-catchers to hunt him down. ” Olympiodorus, Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy. 2 “The Platonic ‘Socrates’ of the Republic is the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism.” Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies. 3 Introduction In the last year of the Second World War, a little-known philosopher called Karl Popper published a work entitled The Open Society and its Enemies in two volumes, the first subtitled The Spell of Plato, and the second focusing on Hegel and Marx. 4 It quickly earned praise from leading academics. In the journal Mind, Gilbert Ryle, the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, declared: This is a powerful and important book. . . . Dr. Popper writes with extreme clarity and vigour. His studies in Greek history and Greek thought have obviously been profound and original. Platonic exegesis will never be the same again. 5 No less a figure than Bertrand Russell (who had recently returned from America to his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge) agreed. Popper’s book was, in fact , a work of first-class importance which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the enemies of democracy, ancient and modern. His attack on Plato, while inorthodox (sic), is to my mind thoroughly justified. . . . The book is a vigorous and profound defence of democracy, timely, very interesting, and very well written. 6 Not all of the attention that Popper’s book at tracted was admiring, however. In 1950, the formidable Chicago scholar Leo Strauss wrote to his associate Eric Voegelin, asking him to “let me know sometime what you think about Mr. Popper. ” 7 Voegelin did not hold back: [Popper] is not able even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says. . . . Briefly and in sum: Popper’s book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally,