At the risk of getting it wrong, here's what I'm picking up from Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies so far ...
Popper is first critical of what he calls historicism. The basic myth of historicism, as he sees it, is that change is inevitable and inevitable change is likely to be bad. For the historicist, things tend to go from bad to worse. Unless, of course, some exceptional soul changes history.
The idea of change, or flux, came from Heraclitus. Plato expanded on this concept with his Form and Ideas. The Form is the perfect representation, the prototype, of ... whatever, society, government, a man. But with each successive change, the thing gets further from its ideal; it becomes increasingly corrupt.
Corruption can only be arrested by the exceptional soul.
My own aside now: Hitler, of course, thought of himself as an exceptional soul. So did Stalin. So does Bin Laden. So did Saddam Hussein.
The answer to historicism seems to be an acceptance of the idea that change is not necessarily bad and that the "social engineering" (Popper's term) can bring about positive change.
If you've read Popper, I welcome rebuttal or correction on my reading of Popper so far.
Article comments
1 - James Russell
That seems like a fair summary to me. I was reading the first part of Open Society a few weeks ago, and will be getting onto the second shortly. I'd only perhaps add that the impression I got was that Popper espoused not so much "an acceptance of the idea that change is not necessarily bad" as an active resistance to totalitarian impositions designed to drive society back to a closed state. Once society starts moving away from the closed position to the open one, it should be allowed to continue in that direction, and so Plato's plan to roll back society to a tribal state along the lines of Sparta was misguided, however sincerely meant. That's my interpretation, anyway.