Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years

Ian Jarvie, Sandra Pralong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134709977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years presents a coherent survey of the reception and influence of Karl Popper's masterpiece The Open Society and its Enemies over the fifty years since its publication in 1945, as well as applying some of its principles to the context of modern Eastern Europe.
This unique volume contains papers by many of Popper's contemporaries and friends, including such luminaries as Ernst Gombrich, in his paper 'The Open Society and its Enemies: Remembering its Publication Fifty Years Ago'.

Part I

PRELIMINARIES

INTRODUCTION

Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong

Fifty years ago, Routledge & Kegan Paul took a chance on a bulky manuscript by an unknown thinker, that, it turned out, made a decisive contribution to liberal thought. That book was The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Karl Popper, who wrote it while he was teaching in New Zealand, called the book his “war effort.” As he observed from afar the threat that fascism posed to freedom and rationalism, he sought to encourage reflection about those aspirations and institutions which can help prevent societies from falling prey to totalitarian ideologies.

Perhaps due to the distance separating him from the theater of events, Popper was among the first political philosophers to put totalitarianism in perspective and to conceive of a framework for the study of society that could identify the parallels between all forms of closed society – tribalist, fascist, communist, religious-fundamentalist, etc.

In a way, the book seems a response to Kant's call in “What is Enlightenment?”, “Sapere Aude!” – Dare to know! For Kant, “The Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutellage ... of incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance” (Popper 1992: 128). Knowledge, thinking for oneself, questioning authority, criticism and self-criticism are, for Popper as for Kant, the tools of one's freedom. The preface to The Open Society's first edition makes this idea clear: “we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men make great mistakes ...” Popper writes, referring to Plato, Hegel, and Marx.

Three views of history: pessimistic, optimistic, indeterministic

The Open Society and Its Enemies was published in London in late 1945, in two volumes. The first, entitled “The Spell of Plato,” was a sustained attempt to trace the history and doctrines of historicism to their Ancient Greek origins, especially Plato. “Historicism” was the name Popper coined for the view that there are inevitable laws of historical development.¹ Plato was a pessimist: the laws of development govern a tendency to deterioration. The best we can do is to slow the process, and that requires tyrannical measures (detailed in The Republic and The Laws).

Although closely focused on Plato, the first volume was wide-ranging. Popper analyzed and criticized the Greek idea that science was the search for essences, that is, for that in virtue of which a thing is what it is. As an alternative, he offered his own view of how modern science proceeds without any theory of essences. Plato had a carefully worked out view of how education and training should prepare persons for the role they will play in society. Popper, by contrast, argued that education should empower one to be autonomous, able to cope with situations and make choices. Above all, Plato was presented as the archetype utopianist, the thinker who, in the name of virtue, considers coercion appropriate. Plato's utopia is backward-looking, a quest to halt the decay of civilization. For Popper, Plato is a great thinker who made great mistakes. This, Popper says, teaches us that we should not defer to great men, but think for ourselves. As an alternative to Plato's influential ideal society, Popper offers the open society, one which attempts to maximize freedom of choice, and which is democratic in the sense that the citizens can overthrow the government without violence.

The second volume, entitled “The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath,” looked principally at the optimist historicist Karl Marx, who held that the laws of history governed an inexorable progress, which could be assisted or smoothed in its passage, but not staunched. By contrast with Plato, Marx was optimistic. He offered hope to humankind. One day the exploitation and oppression would come to an end, even if it should need a paroxysm of violence. Marx's ideas about society are dissected exactly as Plato's were in the first volume. Both are accused of mixing brilliant scientific ideas about society and politics with other claims that are merely prophetic: claims about the future course of things that cannot be known in advance. Great men make great mistakes; great men as prophets can be the deliverers of disaster.

The text of each volume was supported by dense endnotes, in which Popper explored ramifications and sidelights, sometimes to the extent of writing complete essays on a topic (e.g. the dating of Plato's dialogues and Popper's new, bold, and straightforward solution to the Socratic problem; they also contain a detailed and breathtaking review of Wittgenstein's Tractatus).

Although it attacked the Platonism rampant in British educational philosophy, as well as the Marxism so pervasive among intellectuals then and now, the book was widely discussed in the intellectual press. When it was taken to task by Platonists and Marxists, this was usually done in a full and careful way that made it clear this was a book that deserved to be taken seriously. Popper entered British academe as someone who deserved to be listened to. John Watkins has vividly described the intellectual atmosphere in London after the war, and its manifestation at the London School of Economics, where Popper taught alongside Laski, Hayek, and Robbins (Watkins 1977, 1997).

Modestly self-described as a critical introduction to the philosophy of history and of politics, The Open Society was more ambitious than that. It argued that historicism was able to gain its ascendancy largely because the struggle for freedom and democracy had been misformulated by their advocates. There were insoluble paradoxes in the standard discussions of sovereignty and democracy which doomed them. What was needed, Popper suggested, was a recasting of the ideas of the whole tradition. Demands for equality needed to be rooted in the universal human capacity for critical, rational inquiry. Demands for freedom and openness were not about the particular system of government, but about ensuring that in all systems the government be changeable without violence.

The book set a pattern for the reception of Popper's ideas: it tended to polarize serious readers. Although a success with the reading public, its academic reception was mixed. The essentialists, Platonists, historicists, Marxists, and positivists who were attacked in the book adopted various defensive tactics, including distortion and vilification. But the most successful and widely used tactic was to ignore Popper. This could proceed by actual silence; by simply not mentioning him or his ideas no matter how germane; or by quickly knocking down a straw man in his place, such as citing him on some minor point rather than the main point, or giving his name to someone else's ideas or vice versa.

London versus Oxford

In 1946, when the book shot Popper to fame, the dominant school of logical positivism, according to which most philosophy consists of pseudo-problems, was giving way to its analytic descendant, ordinary language philosophy, according to which the analysis of the ordinary uses of words was more than sufficient to dissolve traditional philosophical problems (Gellner 1959). This new philosophy was centered at Oxford University, where Ernest Gellner was on the way to earning First Class Honours and winning the John Locke Prize. Gellner, whose instincts were against language philosophy, was hired to teach philosophy to sociology degree students at the London School of Economics (LSE), possibly as an alternative to allowing them to attend Popper's lectures. It was at the School that Gellner encountered congenial social scientists who showed him how to look sociologically and anthropologically at philosophy. The eventual result was his devastating book, Words and Things (Gellner 1959). It consisted of an account of the history, doctrines, practices, and defensive maneuvers of language philosophy, written in a tart and satirical style. Gellner's innovation consisted in arguing that the history of ideas was insufficient to understand why language philosophy was a movement. To understand that, a sociology of its practitioners and of the institutions in which they practiced was required. Gellner duly supplied one. From the dreaming spires of Oxford, the London School of Economics must have seemed like a nest of heterodoxy and intellectual pollution.

Gellner and Popper had little informal contact during their twenty years as colleagues (the latter retired in 1969), but Popper's colleagues John Watkins and Imre Lakatos were firm friends with Gellner. After Lakatos’ premature death, Gellner moved sideways into the philosophy department, prior to his election to the Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge in 1984.

Towards the end of his life, Gellner (1925–1995) published several pieces (Gellner 1992, 1993, 1996) on the thought of Popper (d. 1994). In one (Gellner 1993), he made it clear that Popper's influence on him was second to none. Popper told Jarvie that after the first meeting between the two (narrated in Gellner 1993), Gellner had written to Popper about The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper averred that it was one of the best critical comments he had ever received (see Appendix B). ² That spirit of critical exchange was continued by Gellner into his posthumously published work, and in his design and organization of the conference upon the papers of which this volume is based.

Popper in the public forum

The career of Popper's ideas was different inside the academy from what it was outside. In intellectual circles Popper was very much admired. But because The Open Society and Its Enemies was hostile to so much academic pretension it was treated less than respectfully by those in the various specialties upon whose turf it trod. An extreme illustration of this is found in the correspondence of two fellow-European exiles of Popper's, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, who lived in the USA. Both considered themselves political philosophers, both were deeply immersed in the Greek classics, and both considered that modern thought had to start with careful consideration of Hegel. Strauss is explicitly opposed to Enlightenment rationalism (Emberly and Cooper 1993: 66). Both also thought that contemporary social science, hollow of philosophical substance, could not explain the rise of National Socialism, indeed might, in some way, be part of the problem. According to Popper's philosophy, per contra, the Hegelian irrationalism and esotericism espoused by Strauss and Voegelin were part of the problem, inimical to the open society.

There was a lot of tension round these issues. In 1950, Popper went to Harvard to deliver the prestigious William James lectures. During his time in the States he appears to have given a talk at the University of Chicago, where Strauss taught. Strauss told Voegelin that the talk “was very bad,” “the most washed-out, lifeless positivism” (Emberly and Cooper 1993: 67), and inquired of his opinion of Popper. Voegelin replied with a vicious letter. He reports having reluctantly read Popper because so many people insist his Open Society is a masterpiece. His judgment is that the book is “impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal ...” (ibid.). Noting that Popper takes the concept of open society from Bergson, he comments that Bergson did not develop it “for the sole purpose that the coffeehouse scum might have something to botch.” Voegelin believed that Bergson would have thought that “Popper's idea of the open society is ideological rubbish” (ibid.).

Voegelin is only just getting started. He accuses Popper of “impertinent disregard for the achievements in this particular problem area [the history of political thought]” (Emberly and Cooper 1993: 68) and of being unable to reproduce accurately the ideas of Plato and Hegel. Popper is “a primitive ideological brawler.” Voegelin then strings more epithets together, “a failed intellectual,” “rascally impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless” (Emberley and Cooper 1993: 67).

The reader astonished at this undignified diatribe needs to remember that in the book in question Popper is vehement about the duty to think for one-self and not to defer to the authority of experts. Strauss and Voegelin agree on the opposite, and on the duty of the enlightened elite to defend standards. Strauss had said he was willing to keep Voegelin's remarks to himself. Voegelin concludes: “It would not be suitable to show this letter to the unqualified. Where it concerns its factual contents, I would see it as a violation of the vocational duty you identified, to support this scandal through silence” (Emberly and Cooper 1993: 69). Following this invitation, Strauss showed the letter to Kurt Riezler, “who was thereby encouraged to throw his not inconsiderable influence into the balance against Popper's probable appointment here [in the US]. You thereby helped to prevent a scandal.”

With hindsight one might think that the scandal is that someone who had dared to challenge the traditional Germanic learning, the worship of the great men, the enemies of science and Enlightenment, is not met out in the open with argument, but is disposed of behind the scenes, as quietly as possible, by the self-righteous use of power.

The intellectual public, however, bought enough copies of The Open Society to keep it continuously in print, frequently revised. Moreover, by the 1950s, it was translated into German and other languages, and its ideas came to have an important influence. One gauge of this in Britain is that Popper was read by working politicians such as Richard Crossman and Anthony Crosland on the left. On the right, Sir Keith Joseph donated the book to the Cabinet library on first being made a minister, and another Conservative minister, Sir Edward, later Lord, Boyle, wrote an appreciative essay in the volume in The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to Popper (Boyle in Schilpp 1994). In Germany and Austria Popper's vocabulary became standard in the attempt to build a philosophy for the democracies of those countries. Some German philosophers (but only some), and influential members of the intellectual and political class, took Popper's ideas for common currency, showering him with public honor and recognition. Translations into all the main European languages ensured a wide currency for the ideas. It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that Popper is a philosophical icon for the European Union's liberals.

Equally important, though less obvious, was Popper's impact in totalitarian areas of Europe. From Spain and Portugal, through Eastern Europe to the USSR and to China, his works were spread in translation and samizdat publication as a fulcrum of intellectual resistance to the official ideology.

After the fall of the Eastern European empire of the USSR in 1989, there was much need to build free and democratic institutions, and to reintroduce notions of freedom of thought, critical thinki...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Popper Today
• PART I Preliminaries
• PART II Addressing the text
• PART III Applying the text
• Subject index
• Name index