1.5 The Open Society

Having dealt with the methodology of the natural sciences, Popper turned his attention again to what had long been of concern to him: the intellectual defects of Marxism, and the philosophy of the social sciences. But before he could get very far with that work, Popper was offered a lectureship at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He accepted, and Popper and his wife left Vienna for New Zealand early in 1937.

For some years Popper had been privately highly critical of policies of socialists in Germany and Austria for playing into the hands of the Fascists and Hitler. This was due, in Popper’s view, to the harmful influence of Marxism. But he had kept these criticisms to himself, as he felt any public criticism could only weaken the forces opposing Hitler. Then, in March 1938, Hitler occupied Austria, and Popper felt all grounds for restraint had disappeared. He decided to put his criticisms of Marxism, and his views on the social sciences, into a publishable form.

He began work on what was to become The Poverty of Historicism. But then, unexpectedly, sections on essentialism, and on totalitarian tendencies in Plato, grew and grew (driven by the desperation of the times), and Popper found he had a new work on his hands: it became what is perhaps his best known, most influential and greatest work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966a, first published 1945). Without referring anywhere to Hitler or Stalin, the book is, nevertheless, an urgent and passionate investigation into the problem and threat of totalitarianism, whether of the right or left. It seeks to understand what the appeal of totalitarianism can be, and why it should have come to be such a threat to civilization. Popper regarded the writing of the book as his contribution to the war effort.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies (O.S.E.), Popper argues that a fundamental problem confronting humanity is that of moving from a closed, tribal way of life to an open society. The closed society is a society that has just one view of the world, one set of values, one basic way of life. It is a world dominated by dogma, fixed taboos and magic, devoid of doubt and uncertainty. The open society, by contrast, tolerates diversity of views, values and ways of life. In the open society learning through criticism is possible just because diverse views and values are tolerated. For Popper, the open society is the civilized society, in which individual freedom and responsibility, justice, democracy, humane values, reason and science can flourish.

But moving from the closed to the open society imposes a great psychological burden on the individuals involved, “the strain of civilization”. Instead of the security of the tribe, organic, dogmatic and devoid of doubt, there is all the uncertainty and insecurity of the open society, the painful necessity of taking personal responsibility for one’s life in a state of ignorance, the lack of intimacy associated with the “abstract society”, in which individuals constantly rub shoulders with strangers. This transition from the closed to the open society is, for Popper, “one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed” (1966a, vol. 1, p. 175). Many cannot bear the burden of freedom and doubt, and long for the false security and certainties of the closed society. In particular, some of the greatest thinkers of Western civilization have given into this temptation and have, in one way or another, urged upon long-suffering humanity a return to something like a closed society under the guise of Utopia. This is true of Plato and Aristotle; and it is true, in more recent times, of Hegel and Marx. The lure of totalitarianism is built deep in our history and traditions.

The revolutionary transition from closed to open society first occurred, according to Popper, with the “Great Generation” of ancient Athens in the fifth century BC. Those to be associated with the birth and affirmation of the open society include Pericles, Herodotus, Protagoras, Democritus, Alcidamas, Lycophron, Antisthenes and, above all, Socrates.

It is from Plato, especially, that we learn of Socrates’ passionate scepticism, his searching criticism of current beliefs and ideals, his conviction that first one must acknowledge one’s own ignorance before one could hope to acquire knowledge and wisdom. But Socrates, Popper argues, was ultimately betrayed by Plato. The greatest advocate of the open society became, in Plato’s Republic, the spokesman for a return to a closed society.

Popper’s devastating account of Plato’s “propaganda” for the closed society, in bald outline, amounts to this. Deeply disturbed by the democracy, and the beginnings of the open society, in contemporary Athens, Plato came to fear all social change as embodying decay and corruption. Synthesizing elements taken from Parmenides, from the Pythagoreans, and from Socrates, Plato turned these fears into an entire cosmology and social theory. Every kind of material object has its perfect copy, its ideal representation, as a Form in a kind of Platonic Heaven (Plato’s famous theory of Forms). These Forms initiated the material universe by printing themselves on space, thus producing initial material copies. But, as time passes, copies of copies gradually become more and more corrupt, further and further removed from their ideal progenitors. And this is just as true in the social and moral sphere as the material. The primary task for the rulers of society is to arrest all social change, and try to keep society resembling, as far as possible, the ideal Forms of order, justice and the Good. Most people know only of imperfect material things; but a very few philosophers, as a result of studying mathematics (which enables us to acquire knowledge of abstract, perfect objects and not just their imperfect material copies), are able to come to see, intellectually, the Forms, and eventually the supreme Form of the Good (represented as the sun in Plato’s famous myth of the cave in The Republic). Enlightened philosophers alone have seen the Form of the Good; they alone know what ideal form society should take, and how it can be protected from the corrupting effects of change. Philosophers, then, must rule, aided by guardians, a class of soldiers or police, who ensure that the rest of the population obeys the strictures of the ruling philosophers. Plato’s republic is a nightmarish totalitarian, closed society, rigidly ordered, individual liberty, freedom of expression and discussion, art, democracy and justice ruthlessly suppressed. But Plato presents all this with great subtlety, with a kind of twisted logic, so that ostensibly he is arguing for a just, wise and harmonious society, one of legal and moral perfection. Popper even suggests that Plato wrote The Republic as a kind of manifesto, to aid his adoption as philosopher-ruler.

Popper’s two big enemies of the open society are Plato (volume 1 of O.S.E.), and Marx (volume 2). Both uphold versions of historicism – the doctrine that history unfolds according to some fixed pattern, to some rigid set of laws of historical evolution. Plato, as we have seen, was a pessimistic historicist: historical change involves decay and degeneration, and all that enlightened philosopher-rulers can do is arrest change somewhat. Marx, by contrast, is an optimistic historicist: historical development will eventually result in socialism and freedom.

Popper traces a direct link from Plato to Marx, via Aristotle and Hegel. Prompted in part by his biological interests, Aristotle modified Plato’s doctrine of the Forms so that it could give an account of biological growth and development. Aristotle inserts a Platonic Form into each individual object so that it becomes the essence of that object, an inherent potentiality which the object, through movement, change or growth, strives to realize. Thus the oak tree is inherent as a potentiality in the acorn. Germination and growth are to be understood as the acorn striving to realize its potentiality, thus becoming an oak tree.

In short, Aristotle modifies Plato’s doctrine of the Forms so that the Form ceases to be the perfect copy of an object from which the object can only decay, and becomes instead an inherent potentiality which the object strives to realize. This modification potentially transforms Plato’s pessimistic historicism of inevitable decay into an optimistic historicism of social growth, development and progress. But not until Hegel, did anyone fully exploit Aristotelianism in this way.

Popper depicts Hegel as a complete intellectual fraud. He agrees with Schopenhauer’s verdict: “Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense” (quoted in Popper, 1966a, vol. 2, pp. 32–3). Hegel’s great idea was to depict history as the process of Spirit, the Aristotelian essence and potentiality of the State and the Nation, striving to realize itself through war and world domination. Taking over and corrupting the antinomies of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1961), Hegel depicted history as a kind of pseudo-rational or logical dialectical process, thesis giving way to antithesis, which then results in synthesis. What matters is not individual liberty or democracy, but rather the triumph of the strongest State on the stage of history, its inner essence interpreted and directed by the Great Leader by means of dictatorial power.

Despite (or because of) his intellectual fraudulence, Hegel exercised – Popper argues – a powerful influence over the development of subsequent nationalist, historicist and totalitarian thought, of both the extreme right and the extreme left. Both Hitler and Stalin stumble onto the world stage out of Hegel, Popper implies (although neither is mentioned by name in O.S.E., as indicted above). In particular, Hegel exercised a powerful and corrupting influence on Karl Marx.

For Popper, Marx is in a quite different category from Hegel. Popper pays tribute to Marx’s sincerity, his humanitarianism, his intellectual honesty, his hatred of moralizing verbiage and hypocrisy, his sense of facts and his sincere quest for the truth, his important contributions to historical studies and social science, his burning desire to help the oppressed. Nevertheless, Marx is one of the most dangerous enemies of the open society, his thought disastrously corrupted by its Hegelian inheritance.

In a well-known passage in Capital, Marx declared that Hegel “stands dialectics on its head; one must turn it the right way up again” (quoted in Popper, 1966a., vol. 2, p. 102). And in another passage, Marx declared: “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness” (quoted ibid., p. 89). Whereas, for Hegel, an idealist, history is the dialectical development of ideas, for Marx history is determined by the dialectical development of material processes, in particular those associated with the means of production. Distinct historical phases – pre-feudal, feudal, capitalistic, post-revolutionary socialist – owe their existence to distinct phases in the means of production, and the social arrangements these phases generate. Each phase leads, as a result of inevitable dialectical processes, to its own destruction and the creation of the next phase. Thus capitalism concentrates wealth and ownership of the means of the production into fewer and fewer hands until, eventually, the workers unite, overthrow the capitalists and establish socialism. The historical processes of dialectical materialism work themselves out through class struggle; classes and the conflicts between them being determined by the means of production. It is the laws determining the evolution of the economic base that decide the path of history; ideas, democratic and legal institutions form an ideological superstructure, which reflects the economic base and the interests of the dominant class, but is powerless to influence the path of history. Marx condemned as “Utopian” those socialists who sought to bring about the revolution by means of political policies and plans. He held that the proper “scientific” approach to bringing about socialism is, first, to discover the dialectical laws governing the evolution of the economic base of society, and then to help this evolution along, in so far as this is possible, thus speeding up the coming of the final, inevitable socialist revolution.

Popper argues that a number of elements of Marxist thought are of value, if not taken too far. There is the idea that the social cannot be reduced to the psychological, sociology not being reducible to psychology. There is the thesis that much of history has been influenced by class struggle, and the idea that the means of production, economic circumstances, play an important role in influencing the development of other aspects of social and cultural life, even something as apparently remote from economic conditions as mathematics. Above all, there is the recognition and depiction of the appalling conditions of life of the poor in the unrestrained capitalist conditions of Marx’s time, and the recognition, too, of the hypocrisy of much of the morality, the legal system and the politics of those times. Having described Marx’s account of the working conditions of children as young as six years, Popper writes: “Such were the conditions of the working class even in 1863, when Marx was writing Capital; his burning protest against these crimes, which were then tolerated, and sometimes even defended, not only by professional economists but also by churchmen, will secure him forever a place among the liberators of mankind” (1966a, vol. 2, p. 122).

But these good points are, for Popper, more than counterbalanced by the dreadful defects, most of which stem from Marx’s historicism, inherited from Hegel. For the central tenet of Marxism is the idea that the laws of dialectical materialism determine the evolution of the means of production, and this in turn determines the evolution of everything else, from class struggle to culture, religion, the law and politics. But this is manifestly false. For one thing, there is a two-way interaction between economic conditions and ideas; eliminate scientific and technological ideas, and the economy would collapse. For another, ideas can themselves influence the course of history, Marxism itself being an example. Historical predictions made by Marx, on the basis of his economic historicism, have been falsified by subsequent historical events. The Russian Revolution is, for example, entirely at odds with Marx’s theory, as is the way in which the unrestricted capitalism of Marx’s time has subsequently become both more economically successful and more just and humane as a result of diverse political interventions. Marx’s economic historicism is not just false; it is pseudoscientific. Only for exceptionally simple systems, such as the solar system, is long-term prediction, based on scientific theory, possible. In the case of social systems, incredibly complex and open to the influence of a multitude of unpredictable factors, the idea that science should be able to deliver long-term predictions is hopelessly unwarranted. Marx’s historicism leads him to turn good points into bad ones by exaggeration. “The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle” (quoted in Popper, 1966a, vol. 2, p. 111) is a good point if “all” is not taken too seriously, but as it stands is an oversimplification and exaggeration; it ignores, for example, power struggles within the ruling class. Again, Marx was surely right to see legal and political institutions of his time as being biased in the direction of the interests of the ruling classes; but he was wrong to condemn all legal and political institutions as inevitably having this function, as his economic historicism compelled him to do.

For Popper, the most damaging feature of Marx’s historicism has to do, perhaps, with the severe limitations that it places on the power of politics, on the capacity of people to solve social problems. Marx is famous for his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it” (quoted in Popper, 1966a, vol. 2, p. 84). But Marx’s economic historicism leads immediately to a severely restricted view as to what political intervention can achieve. In Capital he declares: “When a society has discovered the natural law that determines its own movement, … even then, it can neither overleap the natural phases of its evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by a stroke of the pen. But this much it can do; it can shorten and lessen its birth-pangs” (quoted ibid., p. 86). Just those actions which were to improve the unrestrained capitalism of Marx’s time beyond all recognition, namely political intervention and the actions of trade unions, are discounted at the outset by Marx’s economic determinism as necessarily impotent. Political planning and policymaking for socialism is condemned by Marx, in line with his central doctrine, as inherently inefficacious and Utopian. One disastrous consequence of this was that when Marxists gained power in Russia, they found their literature contained no guidelines as to how to proceed. Another disastrous consequence was that Marxism, blind to the potency of political power, failed to anticipate the dangers inherent in handing over power to political leaders after the revolution, dangers which, after the Russian Revolution, became all too manifest.

The full force of Popper’s criticism is devoted, however, to the central argument of Capital – an argument which seeks to establish the inevitable downfall of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. Popper presents Marx’s arguments as having three steps, only the first of which is elaborated in Capital. The first step argues that an inevitable increase in the productivity of work leads to the accumulation of more and more wealth in the ruling class, and the greater and greater poverty and misery of the working class. The second step then argues that all classes will disappear except for a small, wealthy ruling class and a large impoverished working class, this situation inevitably leading to a revolution. The third step argues that the revolution will result in the victory of the working class, which in turn will result in the withering away of the state and the creation of socialism.

Popper demonstrates that none of these steps is inevitable by showing that alternative developments are entirely possible and, in many cases, have actually happened since Marx wrote Capital. Even if there is a tendency under capitalism for the means of production and wealth to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (as the first step assumes), the state can intervene to counteract this tendency by such means as taxation and death duties. And as far as the increasing poverty of workers is concerned, this can be counteracted by the formation of trade unions, by collective bargaining backed up by strikes. The brutal, unrestricted capitalism of Marx’s time has since been transformed out of all recognition by just such interventionist methods. And Popper makes analogous, decisive points to demolish the second and third steps of Marx’s argument. Even if the ruling class did become increasingly wealthy and the working class increasingly poor (as the second step assumes), this does not mean that all classes but these two would necessarily disappear, since landowners, rural workers, and a new middle class may well exist, given Marx’s assumptions. And even if violence breaks out, this does not mean it would necessarily constitute the social revolution, as envisaged by Marx. And finally, even if it is granted that the workers unite and overthrow the ruling class (as the third step assumes), this does not mean that a classless society and socialism would necessarily result. It is all too easy to suppose that the new political leaders would seize and hold on to power, justifying this by exploiting and twisting the revolutionary ideology, and by invoking the threat of counter-revolutionary forces. And many other possible outcomes can be envisaged. It is in fact implausible to suppose that the victory of the working class would mean the creation of a classless society, and hence the withering away of the state. (This bald summary does not begin to do justice to the cumulative force of Popper’s argument.)

Marx, as we have seen, condemned planning for socialism as Utopian; and in a sense, Popper agrees. Popper distinguishes two kinds of social planning or intervention, which he calls Utopian and piecemeal social engineering. Utopian social engineering seeks to attain an ideal social order, such as socialism, by bringing about holistic changes in society; such an approach is, Popper argues, doomed to failure. Piecemeal social engineering, by contrast, searches for and fights against “the greatest and most urgent evils of society”: this is the approach that Popper advocates (1966a, vol. 1, ch. 9). Subsequently, during the course of criticizing Marx, Popper points out that piecemeal social engineering can take the form either of state intervention, or of the creation of legal, institutional checks on freedom of action. The latter is to be preferred, Popper argues, as the former carries with it the danger of increasing the power of the state (1966a, vol. 2, pp. 129–33).

There is very much more to Popper’s O.S.E. than the above indicates. Central to the book is the idea that reason is a vital component of the open society; reason being understood as “critical rationalism”, arrived at by generalizing Popper’s falsificationist conception of scientific method. For Popper, both scientific method and rationality need to be understood in social terms. Popper criticizes Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge for overlooking the “social aspect of scientific method” (Popper, 1966a, vol. 2, ch. 23). Popper criticizes moral historicism, oracular philosophy and the revolt against reason, and the idea that history might have a meaning (ibid., chs. 22, 24 and 25, respectively). Both volumes have extensive footnotes containing fascinating discussion of a great variety of issues tangentially related to the main argument, such as the development of ancient Greek mathematics, the problem of putting an end to war, or the proper aims of a liberal education.

Popper’s fiercely polemical book has provoked much controversy. His critical onslaughts against Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx have been angrily repudiated by many scholars in these fields, or, much worse, just blandly ignored.