The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge Classics)

by Karl Popper

In this outline of Hegel’s twist of the ‘great truth’ of equalitarianism into its opposite, I have radically abbreviated his argument; and I must warn the reader that I shall have to do the same throughout the chapter; for only in this way is it at all possible to present, in a readable manner, his verbosity and the flight of his thoughts (which, I do not doubt, is pathological40). We may consider liberty next. ‘As regards liberty’, Hegel writes, ‘in former times, the legally defined rights, the private as well as public rights of a city, etc., were called its “liberties”. Really, every genuine law is a liberty; for it contains a reasonable principle …; which means, in other words, that it embodies a liberty …’ Now this argument which tries to show that ‘liberty’ is the same as ‘a liberty’ and therefore the same as ‘law’, from which it follows that the more laws, the more liberty, is clearly nothing but a clumsy statement (clumsy because it relies on a kind of pun) of the paradox of freedom, first discovered by Plato, and briefly discussed above41; a paradox that can be expressed by saying that unlimited freedom leads to its opposite, since without its protection and restriction by law, freedom must lead to a tyranny of the strong over the weak. This paradox, vaguely restated by Rousseau, was solved by Kant, who demanded that the freedom of each man should be restricted, but not beyond what is necessary to safeguard an equal degree of freedom for all. Hegel of course knows...