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The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

Book by Karl Popper · 2 quotes · Platonism, Totalitarianism, Plato

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The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato Quotes

“The internal disunion of human nature, the schism of the soul, leads to the schism of the ruling class. And as with Heraclitus, war, class war, is the father and promoter of all change, and of the history of man, which is nothing but the history of the breakdown of society. We see that Plato’s idealist historicism ultimately rests not upon a spiritual, but upon a biological basis; it rests upon a kind of meta-biology of the race of men. Plato was not only a naturalist who proffered a biological theory of the state, he was also the first to proffer a biological and racial theory of social dynamics, of political history.”

PoliticsRacismPlatoPolitical PhilosophyTotalitarianismAuthoritarianismFar RightPlatonismRacial TheoryIdealist Historicism
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“This ground-plan, conceived by a great architect, exhibits a fundamental metaphysical dualism in Plato’s thought. [...] In politics, it is the opposition between the one collective, the state, which may attain perfection and autarchy, and the great mass of the people—the many individuals, the particular men who must remain imperfect and dependent, and whose particularity is to be suppressed for the sake of the unity of the state (see the next chapter). And this whole dualist philosophy, I believe, originated from the urgent wish to explain the contrast between the vision of an ideal society, and the hateful actual state of affairs in the social field—the contrast between a stable society, and a society in the process of revolution.”

IdealismPlatoSocial ChangeConservatismPolitical PhilosophyAuthoritarianismCollectivismPlatonismImmutabilityAutarchy
Book:The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
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