Popper Quote on the Open Society: Critical of Taboos

Quote

"The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence."

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Volume 1, Chapter 10)

Historical Context

Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies during the Second World War, in New Zealand, as a refugee from the Nazi annexation of Austria. Published in 1945, the book is an intellectual history with an urgent political purpose: to trace the enemies of the open society — Plato, Hegel, Marx — and to show how historicist and authoritarian doctrines lead, with a kind of internal necessity, to totalitarianism. The passage appears in the chapter on Plato, in the midst of Popper's contrast between the "open" society, which prizes freedom, criticism, and the piecemeal reform of its institutions, and the "closed" or tribal society, which is governed by magic, taboo, and unchallengeable authority. The intellectual background is Popper's philosophy of science: in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) he had argued that science progresses by bold conjecture and relentless criticism rather than by the accumulation of certainties. The open society is the political translation of that epistemology — a society that treats its own ideas as corrigible hypotheses, answerable to criticism and evidence, rather than as sacred dogmas.

Philosophical Interpretation

The quotation compresses Popper's "critical rationalism" into a political principle. Two clauses carry the weight. First, the members of an open society have "learned to be to some extent critical of taboos": they do not treat inherited beliefs as beyond question, but hold them at arm's length, examining their grounds. This is the social form of the scientific attitude — the willingness to submit any claim, however venerable, to testing and criticism. Second, they "base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence": the ultimate tribunal is not tradition, not a leader, not a party, but the exercise of individual reason in open discussion. Popper's point is not that individual intelligence is infallible — the whole of his epistemology denies that. It is that no other authority is more reliable: the only alternative to the critical use of intelligence is the uncritical acceptance of some authority, and that path leads to the closed society. The quotation also reveals the modesty built into critical rationalism: we are to be critical "to some extent" — because our knowledge is always fallible, no decision is beyond revision, and the humility of the fallibilist is the psychological precondition of toleration. The open society, on this view, is not a utopia of certainties but a community of people who have agreed to keep arguing, and to change their minds when the evidence demands it.

Related Concepts

The quotation connects Popper's epistemology and his political philosophy. The scientific side of critical rationalism is developed in what is falsification and The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and the problem it answers is posed by Hume in what is the problem of induction. The political side is the subject of the knowledge and truth and reasoning topics, where the critical attitude is treated as a cognitive virtue. Popper's stress on corrigibility connects to open-mindedness and doubt in the wisdom library.

Learning Path

1. Start with the thinker: Read the Karl Popper page for the unity of his epistemology and politics.
2. Understand the epistemology: Critical rationalism begins with what is falsification and the rejection of induction in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
3. Read the source: The Open Society and Its Enemies (Volume 1) argues the case against Plato and for the open society in full.
4. Connect to thinking skills: The critical attitude toward taboos is the social form of critical thinking — see its toolkit in what is critical thinking.
5. Reflect on the virtue: The fallibilist humility behind the quotation is explored in the humility and open-mindedness wisdom pages.