The Open Society and Its Enemies

Popper wrote this in exile in New Zealand during the Second World War and called it his “war effort”: an attack on the idea that history has a knowable direction, and on the philosophers he held responsible for making that idea respectable. Volume one prosecutes Plato, volume two Hegel and Marx. The charge is the same in both — that any politics claiming to know where history is going must eventually suppress the people who disagree, because it treats dissent as error rather than information. Against it he sets the open society: institutions arranged so that policy can be criticised and reversed, which is the political form of his account of science, where a theory earns its standing only by being exposed to refutation.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s first section treats knowledge itself as the subject. Popper is the text on how you are permitted to know anything at all — falsification over confirmation — and the book that carries the argument from science into politics, which is why it sits with the evolution and civilisation titles rather than the investing ones.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in its first section — Science, Philosophy, Evolution, History of Human Civilization, Human History, where it appears alongside Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Kyle saved the list as two X posts that photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came out of the source PDF.

Connections

• Karl Popper — the author; the list carries two of his books.
• Falsifiability — the epistemology this book turns into a theory of government.
• Totalitarianism — the target.
• Utopia — and the specific form of confidence Popper thinks produces it.
• Plato — the defendant in volume one.
• Democracy — defended here on error-correction grounds rather than moral ones.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.