Best Served Cold

Five years ago I was supervising a really interesting senior thesis in which the student made extensive use of Karl Popper.  She also made extensive use of Homer, Dante, Joyce, Plato, and Marx—I had read all of those 5 authors.  I’d never read Popper.  The student kept trying to convince me to read The Open Society and Its Enemies.  I knew enough about the book to have a discussion about it, but she insisted (and rightfully so) that I really should read it.  She said it was a fast read, that I could read it in an evening.  I eventually bought a copy—well, the singular there is a bit deceiving, the book is actually two volumes long.  Smallish print.  It didn’t look like a one night read. 

So, here I am five years later and I read it.  It took a lot longer than one evening.  Now I wonder if my dear student, who shall remain nameless a) lest this look like I am casting aspersion on someone who ended up in Stanford Law School (perish the thought!) and b) so that this post will be unGoogleable for reasons delineated below…anyway, said student, unless being the type who goes to Stanford Law School is also the type who can read 750 pages of dense prose in an evening, was deliberately deceiving me in order to convince me to read the book.

Evaluating the book is a bit of a challenge as a result.  I spent most of the time reading it thinking, “This book sure is tediously long.”

Volume 1 was relatively fun.  In it, Popper skewers Plato. One gets the joy of watching an icon get destroyed.  (Yes, I am an iconoclast at heart.  Shocking, to be sure.)  In volume 2, Popper takes apart Marx. Yawn.  Get in line, Karl, get in line.

My advice: if you are going to read this, set aside more than a night.  And stop at the end of volume 1.  And if you ever meet a really amazing lawyer whose name has been carefully avoided throughout this post (initials: MH) but who was an MHC undergrad and a Stanford Law School grad, tell her that she really should have picked someone other than Popper for her thesis and don’t tell her how you know about the thesis.  That will be my revenge.

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