Popper identified some dangerous elements, which had to be prosecuted and excluded in the name of ‘our civilization’. This kind of argument changed the basic view that traditional Western intellectual history had continuously progressed toward the realization of humanity, liberty, equality, and eventually democracy. In this context, Plato was singled out as one of the important sources of this regime, along with Hegel and Marx. It tried to defend ‘our civilization’ against the new Leviathan by harshly criticizing some intellectual traditions of Western socio-political thought which seemed to encourage the coming of the totalitarian regime. 1 This work was clearly an intellectual product of the political experiences of the first part of the 20th century, dominated by the coming of the new political regime of totalitarianism. 2When I began my studies in the 1960s, the most popular image of Plato for the student of social sciences seemed to be the image deriving from the first part of Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies ( The Spell of Plato).
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