How long does it take to read The Open Society and Its Enemies?
The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl R. Popper takes about 13 hours 25 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 13 hours 25 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1945. 732 pages, about 201,300 words.
27 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 22 hours 22 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 13 hours 25 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 8 hours 23 minutes |
The page count is the median across 76 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
An open society provides its citizens with a mechanism for changing government; a closed society doesn't, forcing its citizens to rely on extra-legal revolution. Popper analyzes the open-closed society debate using three exemplars of closed-society advocacy: Plato, Hegel (and wow, does Popper hate on Hegel), and Marx. The main analytical viewpoints are historicist (backward-looking, utopian) motivations for closed societies and rational (forward-looking, empirical) motivations for open societies.
Subjects: Philosophy, Political science, Social sciences, Sociology, Sociologia, Social change
