ABSTRACT
I had been told that Ernest Gellner was the author of the joke that The Open Society and Its Enemies should have been called The Open Society by One of Its Enemies. So I was not too surprised to see that the conference that he organized in Prague to celebrate the book’s fiftieth anniversary was supposed to have a critical edge. One of the themes that Gellner announced was “the relevance of the ideas and values of [The Open Society and Its Enemies] to the aftermath of a totalitarian collapse, as opposed to their initial relevance as an attempt to undermine a victorious or expanding totalitarianism.” A second was “the validity or otherwise of the parallel drawn by Popper between the principles of an Open Society and of scientific enquiry.” And Gellner, in emphasizing that the conference should discuss criticisms of the Popperian tradition, raised the question: “Has [Popper] underestimated the importance and value of communalist thinking?” as a third.
