Summary Of "The Open Society And Its Enemies" By Karl Popper - UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES - E-book - ePub

We have summarized here the essential of this book by the author. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIESTHE OPEN SOCIETY, THE OPEN UNIVERSETolerance and intellectual responsibilityPopper argues INTELLECTUALS, for thousands of years, HAVE CAUSED the most horrible damage: KILLING IN THE NAME OF AN IDEA OR A THEORY. The most important of the Ten Commandments says: "You shall not kill". But, especially after Christianity became a state religion, there has been a terrible history of religious persecutions, persecutions in defense of orthodoxy.
Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other ideological foundations came to justify persecution, cruelty and terror: nationality, race, political orthodoxies, other religions. Hidden in the idea of orthodoxy and in heresy are those vices to which intellectuals are especially prone: arrogance, pedantry, intellectual presumption.