The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge Classics)

by Karl Popper

But this moral intellectualism of Socrates is a two-edged sword. It has its equalitarian and democratic aspect, which was later developed by Antisthenes. But it has also an aspect which may give rise to strongly anti-democratic tendencies. Its stress upon the need for enlightenment, for education, might easily be misinterpreted as a demand for authoritarianism. This is connected with a question which seems to have puzzled Socrates a great deal: that those who are not sufficiently educated, and thus not wise enough to know their deficiencies, are just those who are in the greatest need of education. Readiness to learn in itself proves the possession of wisdom, in fact all the wisdom claimed by Socrates for himself; for he who is ready to learn knows how little he knows. The uneducated seems thus to be in need of an authority to wake him up, since he cannot be expected to be self-critical. But this one element of authoritarianism was wonderfully balanced in Socrates’ teaching by the emphasis that the authority must not claim more than that. The true teacher can prove himself only by exhibiting that self-criticism which the uneducated lacks. ‘Whatever authority I may have rests solely upon my knowing how little I know’: this is the way in which Socrates might have justified his mission to stir up the people from their dogmatic slumber. This educational mission he believed to be also a political mission. He felt that the way to improve the political life of the city was to edu...

I have tried to show that Socrates’ intellectualism was fundamentally equalitarian and individualistic, and that the element of authoritarianism which it involved was reduced to a minimum by Socrates’ intellectual modesty and his scientific attitude. The intellectualism of Plato is very different from this. The Platonic ‘Socrates’ of the Republic14 is the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism. (Even his self-deprecating remarks are not based upon awareness of his limitations, but are rather an ironical way of asserting his superiority.) His educational aim is not the awakening of self-criticism and of critical thought in general. It is, rather, indoctrination— the moulding of minds and of souls which (to repeat a quotation from the Laws15) are ‘to become, by long habit, utterly incapable of doing anything at all independently’. And Socrates’ great equalitarian and liberating idea that it is possible to reason with a slave, and that there is an intellectual link between man and man, a medium of universal understanding, namely, ‘reason’, this idea is replaced by a demand for an educational monopoly of the ruling class, coupled with the strictest censorship, even of oral debates.

Plato’s demand that the wise man should rule—the possessor of truth, the ‘fully qualified philosopher’17—raises, of course, the problem of selecting and educating the rulers. In a purely personalist (as opposed to an institutional) theory, this problem might be solved simply by declaring that the wise ruler will in his wisdom be wise enough to choose the best man for his successor. This is not, however, a very satisfactory approach to the problem. Too much would depend on uncontrolled circumstances; an accident may destroy the future stability of the state. But the attempt to control circumstances, to foresee what might happen and to provide for it, must lead here, as everywhere, to the abandonment of a purely personalist solution, and to its replacement by an institutional one. As already stated, the attempt to plan for the future must always lead to institutionalism.

Plato interprets medicine as a form of politics, or as he puts it himself, he ‘regards Aesculapius, the god of medicine, as a politician’4. Medical art, he explains, must not consider the prolongation of life as its aim, but only the interest of the state.

In fact, Plato’s attitude towards religion as revealed by his ‘inspired lie’ is practically identical with that of Critias, his beloved uncle, the brilliant leader of the Thirty Tyrants who established an inglorious blood-régime in Athens after the Peloponnesian war. Critias, a poet, was the first to glorify propaganda lies, whose invention he described in forceful verses eulogizing the wise and cunning man who fabricated religion, in order to ‘persuade’ the people, i.e. to threaten them into submission.17 ‘Then came, it seems, that wise and cunning man, The first inventor of the fear of gods … He framed a tale, a most alluring doctrine, Concealing truth by veils of lying lore. He told of the abode of awful gods, Up in revolving vaults, whence thunder roars And lightning’s fearful flashes blind the eye … He thus encircled men by bonds of fear; Surrounding them by gods in fair abodes, He charmed them by his spells, and daunted them— And lawlessness turned into law and order. In Critias’ view, religion is nothing but the lordly lie of a great and clever statesman.

The first and the most important function of the philosopher king is that of the city’s founder and lawgiver. It is clear why Plato needs a philosopher for this task. If the state is to be stable, then it must be a true copy of the divine Form or Idea of the State. But only a philosopher who is fully proficient in the highest of sciences, in dialectics, is able to see, and to copy, the heavenly Original.

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity and humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesman against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most—that we are all frail human beings. What a decline from this world of irony and reason and truthfulness down to Plato’s kingdom of the sage whose magical powers raise him high above ordinary men; although not quite high enough to forgo the use of lies, or to neglect the sorry trade of every shaman—the selling of spells, of breeding spells, in exchange for power over his fellow-men.

One of them is that the painter and those who co-operate with him as well as the institutions which make their life possible, his dreams and plans for a better world, and his standards of decency and morality, are all part of the social system, i.e. of the picture to be wiped out. If they were really to clean the canvas, they would have to destroy themselves, and their Utopian plans.

True happiness1, Plato insists, is achieved only by justice, i.e. by keeping one’s place. The ruler must find happiness in ruling, the warrior in warring; and, we may infer, the slave in slaving.

Since I have not so far said much about Pericles, and nothing at all about Democritus, I may use some of their own words in order to illustrate the new faith. First Democritus: ‘Not out of fear but out of a feeling of what is right should we abstain from doing wrong … Virtue is based, most of all, upon respecting the other man … Every man is a little world of his own … We ought to do our utmost to help those who have suffered injustice … To be good means to do no wrong; and also, not to want to do wrong … It is good deeds, not words, that count … The poverty of a democracy is better than the prosperity which allegedly goes with aristocracy or monarchy, just as liberty is better than slavery … The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.’ To him is due also that remark of a true scientist: ‘I would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia!’29

it was Socrates who created the conception of the soul, a conception which had such an immense influence upon our civilization. I believe that there is much in this view, although I feel that its formulation may be misleading, especially the use of the term ‘soul’; for Socrates seems to have kept away from metaphysical theories as much as he could. His appeal was a moral appeal, and his theory of individuality (or of the ‘soul’, if this word is preferred) is, I think, a moral and not a metaphysical doctrine. He was fighting, with the help of this doctrine, as always, against self-satisfaction and complacency. He demanded that individualism should not be merely the dissolution of tribalism, but that the individual should prove worthy of his liberation. This is why he insisted that man is not merely a piece of flesh—a body. There is more in man, a divine spark, reason; and a love of truth, of kindness, humaneness, a love of beauty and of goodness. It is these that make a man’s life worth while.

Socrates had only one worthy successor, his old friend Antisthenes, the last of the Great Generation. Plato, his most gifted disciple, was soon to prove the least faithful. He betrayed Socrates, just as his uncles had done. These, besides betraying Socrates, had also tried to implicate him in their terrorist acts, but they did not succeed, since he resisted. Plato tried to implicate Socrates in his grandiose attempt to construct the theory of the arrested society; and he had no difficulty in succeeding, for Socrates was dead.

Instead of showing his hostility to reason, he charmed all intellectuals with his brilliance, flattering and thrilling them by his demand that the learned should rule. Although arguing against justice he convinced all righteous men that he was its advocate. Not even to himself did he fully admit that he was combating the freedom of thought for which Socrates had died; and by making Socrates his champion he persuaded all others that he was fighting for it. Plato thus became, unconsciously, the pioneer of the many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes. And he achieved the somewhat surprising effect of convincing even great humanitarians of the immorality and selfishness of their creed

Socrates had refused to compromise his personal integrity. Plato, with all his uncompromising canvas-cleaning, was led along a path on which he compromised his integrity with every step he took. He was forced to combat free thought, and the pursuit of truth. He was led to defend lying, political miracles, tabooistic superstition, the suppression of truth, and ultimately, brutal violence. In spite of Socrates’ warning against misanthropy and misology, he was led to distrust man and to fear argument. In spite of his own hatred of tyranny, he was led to look to a tyrant for help, and to defend the most tyrannical measures.

Aristotle’s thought is entirely dominated by Plato’s. Somewhat grudgingly, he followed his great teacher as closely as his temperament permitted, not only in his general political outlook but practically everywhere. So he endorsed, and systematized, Plato’s naturalistic theory of slavery3: ‘Some men are by nature free, and others slaves; and for the latter, slavery is fitting as well as just … A man who is by nature not his own, but another’s, is by nature a slave … Hellenes do not like to call themselves slaves, but confine this term to barbarians … The slave is totally devoid of any faculty of reasoning’, while free women have just a very little of it. (We owe to Aristotle’s criticisms and denunciations most of our knowledge of the Athenian movement against slavery. By arguing against the fighters for freedom, he preserved some of their utterances.)

But the theory of slavery is only one of Plato’s many political ideas to be adopted by Aristotle. Especially his theory of the Best State, as far as we know it, is modelled upon the theories of the Republic and the Laws; and his version throws considerable light on Plato’s. Aristotle’s Best State is a compromise between three things, a romantic Platonic aristocracy, a ‘sound and balanced’ feudalism, and some democratic ideas; but feudalism has the best of it. With the democrats, Aristotle holds that all citizens should have the right to participate in the government. But this, of course, is not meant to be as radical as it sounds, for Aristotle explains at once that not only slaves but all members of the producing classes are excluded from citizenship.

For Aristotle, every form of professionalism means a loss of caste. A feudal gentleman, he insists5, must never take too much interest in ‘any occupation, art or science … There are also some liberal arts, that is to say, arts which a gentleman may acquire, but always only to a certain degree. For if he takes too much interest in them, then these evil effects will follow’, namely, he will become proficient, like a professional, and lose caste.

This theory of motion appealed to the zoologist Aristotle; it combines easily with the theory of final causes, and it allows an explanation of all motion as being analogous with the canter of horses keen to return to their stables. He developed it as his famous theory of natural places. Everything if removed from its own natural place has a natural tendency to return to it.

The new tendency is to discard proofs, and with them, any kind of rational argument. With the romantics, a new kind of dogmatism becomes fashionable, in philosophy as well as in the social sciences. It confronts us with its dictum. And we can take it or leave it. This romantic period of an oracular philosophy, called by Schopenhauer the ‘age of dishonesty’, is described by him as follows53: ‘The character of honesty, that spirit of undertaking an inquiry together with the reader, which permeates the works of all previous philosophers, disappears here completely. Every page witnesses that these so-called philosophers do not attempt to teach, but to bewitch the reader.’

It will hardly be necessary again to stress the fact that my treatment of Aristotle is most sketchy—much more so than my treatment of Plato. The main purpose of what has been said about both of them is to show the rôle they have played in the rise of historicism and in the fight against the open society, and to show their influence on problems of our own time—on the rise of the oracular philosophy of Hegel, the father of modern historicism and totalitarianism.

The philosophy of Hegel, then, was… a scrutiny of thought so profound that it was for the most part unintelligible… J. H. STIRLING.

Hegel, the source of all contemporary historicism, was a direct follower of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Hegel achieved the most miraculous things. A master logician, it was child’s play for his powerful dialectical methods to draw real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical silk-hats. Thus, starting from Plato’s Timaeus and its number-mysticism, Hegel succeeded in ‘proving’ by purely philosophical methods (114 years after Newton’s Principia) that the planets must move according to Kepler’s laws. He even accomplished1 the deduction of the actual position of the planets, thereby proving that no planet could be situated between Mars and Jupiter (unfortunately, it had escaped his notice that such a planet had been discovered a few months earlier).

Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries.

But if that is so, why worry any more about Hegel? The answer is that Hegel’s influence has remained a most powerful force, in spite of the fact that scientists never took him seriously, and that (apart from the ‘evolutionists’6) many philosophers are beginning to lose interest in him. Hegel’s influence, and especially that of his cant, is still very powerful in moral and social philosophy and in the social and political sciences (with the sole exception of economics). Especially the philosophers of history, of politics, and of education are still to a very large extent under its sway. In politics, this is shown most drastically by the fact that the Marxist extreme left wing, as well as the conservative centre, and the fascist extreme right, all base their political philosophies on Hegel; the left wing replaces the war of nations which appears in Hegel’s historicist scheme by the war of classes, the extreme right replaces it by the war of races; but both follow him more or less consciously. (The conservative centre is as a rule less conscious of its indebtedness to Hegel.)

When in 1815 the reactionary party began to resume its power in Prussia, it found itself in dire need of an ideology. Hegel was appointed to meet this demand, and he did so by reviving the ideas of the first great enemies of the open society, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Just as the French Revolution rediscovered the perennial ideas of the Great Generation and of Christianity, freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, so Hegel rediscovered the Platonic ideas which lie behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism.

could be found at the time. Schopenhauer, who had the pleasure of knowing Hegel personally and who suggested13 the use of Shakespeare’s words, ‘such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not’, as the motto of Hegel’s philosophy, drew the following excellent picture of the master: ‘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. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.

(Who could resist mentioning in this context the fact that Marxist philosophers, always ready to point out how an opponent’s theory is affected by his class interest, habitually fail to apply this method to Hegel? Instead of denouncing him as an apologist for Prussian absolutism, they regret18 that the works of the originator of dialectics, and especially his works on logic, are not more widely read in Britain—in contrast to Russia, where the merits of Hegel’s philosophy in general, and of his logic in particular, are officially recognized.)

As a first example of this use of dialectics, I shall select the problem of freedom of thought, of the independence of science, and of the standards of objective truth, as treated by Hegel in the Philosophy of Law (§ 270). He begins with what can only be interpreted as a demand for freedom of thought, and for its protection by the state: ‘The state’, he writes, ‘has … thought as its essential principle. Thus freedom of thought, and science, can originate only in the state; it was the Church that burnt Giordano Bruno, and forced Galileo to recant … Science, therefore, must seek protection from the state, since … the aim of science is knowledge of objective truth.’ After this promising start which we may take as representing the ‘first impressions’ of his opponents, Hegel proceeds to bring them ‘to the opposite of what their first impressions pronounced correct’, covering his change of front by another sham attack on the Church: ‘But such knowledge does, of course, not always conform with the standards of science, it may degenerate into mere opinion …; and for these opinions … it’ (i.e. science) ‘may raise the same pretentious demand as the Church—the demand to be free in its opinions and convictions.’ Thus the demand for freedom of thought, and of the claim of science to judge for itself, is described as ‘pretentious’; but this is merely the first step in Hegel’s twist. We next hear that, if faced with subversive opinions, ‘the state must protect objective truth’; which rai...

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...

Heraclitus had maintained that there is a hidden reason in history. For Hegel, history becomes an open book. The book is pure apologetics. By its appeal to the wisdom of Providence it offers an apology for the excellence of Prussian monarchism; by its appeal to the excellence of Prussian monarchism it offers an apology for the wisdom of Providence.

But this moral positivism does not fully satisfy Hegel. He wants more. Just as he opposes liberty and equality, so he opposes the brotherhood of man, humanitarianism, or, as he says, ‘philanthropy’. Conscience must be replaced by blind obedience and by a romantic Heraclitean ethics of fame and fate, and the brotherhood of man by a totalitarian nationalism

Nationalism appeals to our tribal instincts, to passion and to prejudice, and to our nostalgic desire to be relieved from the strain of individual responsibility which it attempts to replace by a collective or group responsibility.

With Alexander’s empire, genuine tribal nationalism disappears for ever from political practice, and for a long time from political theory. From Alexander onward, all the civilized states of Europe and Asia were empires, embracing populations of infinitely mixed origin. European civilization and all the political units belonging to it have remained international or, more precisely, inter-tribal ever since. (It seems that about as long before Alexander as Alexander was before us, the empire of ancient Sumer had created the first international civilization.) And what holds good of political practice holds good of political theory; until about a hundred years ago, the Platonic-Aristotelian nationalism had practically disappeared from political doctrines. (Of course, tribal and parochial feelings were always strong.) When nationalism was revived a hundred years ago, it was in one of the most mixed of all the thoroughly mixed regions of Europe, in Germany, and especially in Prussia with its largely Slav population. (It is not well known that barely a century ago, Prussia, with its then predominantly Slav population, was not considered a German state at all; though its kings, who as princes of Brandenburg were ‘Electors’ of the German Empire, were considered German princes. At the Congress of Vienna, Prussia was registered as a ‘Slav kingdom’; and in 1830 Hegel still spoke52 even of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg as being populated by ‘Germanized Slavs’.)

The principle of the national state, that is to say, the political demand that the territory of every state should coincide with the territory inhabited by one nation, is by no means so self-evident as it seems to appear to many people to-day. Even if anyone knew what he meant when he spoke of nationality, it would be not at all clear why nationality should be accepted as a fundamental political category, more important for instance than religion, or birth within a certain geographical region, or loyalty to a dynasty, or a political creed like democracy (which forms, one might say, the uniting factor of multi-lingual Switzerland). But while religion, territory, or a political creed can be more or less clearly determined, nobody has ever been able to explain what he means by a nation, in a way that could be used as a basis for practical politics. (Of course, if we say that a nation is a number of people who live or have been born in a certain state, then everything is clear; but this would mean giving up the principle of the national state which demands that the state should be determined by the nation, and not the other way round.) None of the theories which maintain that a nation is united by a common origin, or a common language, or a common history, is acceptable, or applicable in practice.

In spite of its inherent reactionary and irrational tendencies, modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel a revolutionary and liberal creed. By something like an historical accident—the invasion of German lands by the first national army, the French army under Napoleon, and the reaction caused by this event—it had made its way into the camp of freedom. It is not without interest to sketch the history of this development, and of the way in which Hegel brought nationalism back into the totalitarian camp where it had belonged from the time when Plato first maintained that Greeks are related to barbarians like masters to slaves.

At the time when Fichte became the apostle of nationalism, an instinctive and revolutionary nationalism was rising in Germany as a reaction to the Napoleonic invasion. (It was one of those typical tribal reactions against the expansion of a super-national empire.) The people demanded democratic reforms which they understood in the sense of Rousseau and of the French Revolution, but which they wanted without their French conquerors. They turned against their own princes and against the emperor at the same time. This early nationalism arose with the force of a new religion, as a kind of cloak in which a humanitarian desire for freedom and equality was clad. ‘Nationalism’, Anderson writes59, ‘grew as orthodox Christianity declined, replacing the latter with belief in a mystical experience of its own.’ It is the mystical experience of community with the other members of the oppressed tribe, an experience which replaced not only Christianity but especially the feeling of trust and loyalty to the king which the abuses of absolutism had destroyed. It is clear that such an untamed new and democratic religion was a source of great irritation, and even of danger, to the ruling class, and especially to the king of Prussia.

History is the contest of the various national spirits for world domination. From this it follows that the reforms advocated by the liberal nationalists are unnecessary, since the nation and its spirit are the leading actors anyway; besides, ‘every nation … has the constitution which is appropriate to it and belongs to it’. (Juridical positivism.) We see that Hegel replaces the liberal elements in nationalism not only by a Platonic-Prussianist worship of the state, but also by a worship of history, of historical success.

The ‘scientific’ element in racialism can be traced back to Haeckel, who was responsible, in 1900, for a prize-competition whose subject was: ‘What can we learn from the principles of Darwinism in respect of the internal and political development of a state?’ The first prize was allotted to a voluminous racialist work by W. Schallmeyer, who thus became the grandfather of racial biology. It is interesting to observe how strongly this materialist racialism, despite its very different origin, resembles the naturalism of Plato. In both cases, the basic idea is that degeneration, particularly of the upper classes, is at the root of political decay (read: of the advance of the open society). Moreover, the modern myth of Blood and Soil has its exact counterpart in Plato’s Myth of the Earthborn. Nevertheless, not ‘Hegel + Plato’, but ‘Hegel + Haeckel’ is the formula of modern racialism. As we shall see, Marx replaced Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race.

Zimmern calls67 the ‘armoury of weapons for authoritarian movements’. Although most of these weapons were not forged by Hegel himself, but discovered by him in the various ancient war treasuries of the perennial revolt against freedom, it is undoubtedly his effort which rediscovered them and placed them in the hands of his modern followers. Here is a brief list of some of the most precious of these ideas. (I omit Platonic totalitarianism and tribalism, which have already been discussed, as well as the theory of master and slave.) (a) Nationalism, in the form of the historicist idea that the state is the incarnation of the Spirit (or now, of the Blood) of the state-creating nation (or race); one chosen nation (now, the chosen race) is destined for world domination. (b) The state as the natural enemy of all other states must assert its existence in war. (c) The state is exempt from any kind of moral obligation; history, that is, historical success, is the sole judge; collective utility is the sole principle of personal conduct; propagandist lying and distortion of the truth is permissible. (d) The ‘ethical’ idea of war (total and collectivist), particularly of young nations against older ones; war, fate and fame as most desirable goods. (e) The creative rôle of the Great Man, the world-historical personality, the man of deep knowledge and great passion (now, the principle of leadership). (f) The ideal of the heroic life (‘live dangerously’) and of the ‘heroic man’ as opposed...

would otherwise have had no access, says80 most strikingly: ‘All of us … who stand for … rational, civilized methods of government and social organization, agree that war is in itself an evil …’ Adding that in the opinion of most of us (except the pacifists) it might become, under certain circumstances, a necessary evil, he continues: ‘The nationalist attitude is different, though it need not imply a desire for perpetual or frequent warfare. It sees in a war a good rather than an evil, even if it be a dangerous good, like an exceedingly heady wine that is best reserved for rare occasions of high festivity.’ War is not a common and abundant evil but a precious though rare good:—this sums up the views of Hegel and of his followers.

Together with the idea of fate, its counterpart, that of fame is also revived by Hegel: ‘Individuals … are instruments … What they personally gain … through the individual share they take in the substantial business (prepared and appointed independently of them) is … Fame, which is their reward.’83 And Stapel, a propagator of the new paganized Christianity, promptly repeats: ‘All great deeds were done for the sake of fame or glory.’ But this ‘Christian’ moralist is even more radical than Hegel: ‘Metaphysical glory is the one true morality’, he teaches, and the ‘Categorical Imperative’ of this one true morality runs accordingly: ‘Do such deeds as spell glory!’

Hegel, always faithful to his historicism, bases his anti-utilitarian attitude (in distinction to Aristotle’s utilitarian comments upon the ‘dangers of prosperity’) on his interpretation of history: ‘The History of the World is no theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony.’ Thus, liberalism, freedom and reason are, as usual, objects of Hegel’s attacks. The hysterical cries: We want our history! We want our destiny! We want our fight! We want our chains! resound through the edifice of Hegelianism, through this stronghold of the closed society and of the revolt against freedom.

The collectivists … have the zest for progress, the sympathy for the poor, the burning sense of wrong, the impulse for great deeds, which have been lacking in latter-day liberalism. But their science is founded on a profound misunderstanding …, and their actions, therefore, are deeply destructive and reactionary. So men’s hearts are torn, their minds divided, they are offered impossible choices. WALTER LIPPMANN.

It has always been the strategy of the revolt against freedom ‘to take advantage of sentiments, not wasting one’s energies in futile efforts to destroy them’1. The most cherished ideas of the humanitarians were often loudly acclaimed by their deadliest enemies, who in this way penetrated into the humanitarian camp under the guise of allies, causing disunion and thorough confusion. This strategy has often been highly successful, as is shown by the fact that many genuine humanitarians still revere Plato’s idea of ‘justice’, the medieval idea of ‘Christian’ authoritarianism, Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’, or Fichte’s and Hegel’s ideas of ‘national freedom’.2 Yet this method of penetrating dividing and confusing the humanitarian camp and of building up a largely unwitting and therefore doubly effective intellectual fifth column achieved its greatest success only after Hegelianism had established itself as the basis of a truly humanitarian movement: of Marxism, so far the purest, the most developed and the most dangerous form of historicism.

One cannot do justice to Marx without recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world’s most influential fighters against hypocrisy and pharisaism. He had a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in words. His main talents being theoretical, he devoted immense labour to forging what he believed to be scientific weapons for the fight to improve the lot of the vast majority of men. His sincerity in his search for truth and his intellectual honesty distinguish him, I believe, from many of his followers (although unfortunately he did not altogether escape the corrupting influence of an upbringing in the atmosphere of Hegelian dialectics, described by Schopenhauer as ‘destructive of all intelligence’4). Marx’s interest in social science and social philosophy was fundamentally a practical interest. He saw in knowledge a means of promoting the progress of man5. Why, then, attack Marx? In spite of his merits, Marx was, I believe, a false prophet. He was a prophet of the course of history, and his prophecies did not come true; but this is not my main accusation. It is much more important that he misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible for the devastating influence of the historicist metho...

Marx’s thought was in many respects a product of his time, when the remembrance of that great historical earthquake, the French Revolution, was still fresh. (It was revived by the revolution of 1848.) Such a revolution could not, he felt, be planned and staged by human reason. But it could have been foreseen by a historicist social science; sufficient insight into the social situation would have revealed its causes.

When tracing back traditions and institutions to their origin, we must find that their introduction is explicable in psychological terms, since they have been introduced by man for some purpose or other, and under the influence of certain motives. And even if these motives have been forgotten in the course of time, then that forgetfulness, as well as our readiness to put up with institutions whose purpose is obscure, is in its turn based on human nature. Thus ‘all phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature’7, as Mill said; and ‘the Laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings’, that is to say, ‘the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance …’8 This last remark of Mill’s exhibits one of the most praiseworthy aspects of psychologism, namely, its sane opposition to collectivism and holism, its refusal to be impressed by Rousseau’s or Hegel’s romanticism—by a general will or a national spirit, or perhaps, by a group mind. Psychologism is, I believe, correct only in so far as it insists upon what may be called ‘methodological individualism’ as opposed to ‘methodological collectivism’; it rightly insists that the ‘behaviour’ and the ‘actions’ of collectives, such as states or social groups, must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals.

This view of the aims of the social sciences arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. This theory is widely held; it is older even than historicism (which, as shown by its primitive theistic form, is a derivative of the conspiracy theory). In its modern forms it is, like modern historicism, and a certain modern attitude towards ‘natural laws’, a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups—sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

Marx, they think, taught the all-pervading influence of the economic motive in the life of men; he succeeded in explaining its overpowering strength by showing that ‘man’s overmastering need was to get the means of living’1; he thus demonstrated the fundamental importance of such categories as the profit motive or the motive of class interest for the actions not only of individuals but also of social groups; and he showed how to use these categories for explaining the course of history. Indeed, they think that the very essence of Marxism is the doctrine that economic motives and especially class interest are the driving forces of history, and that it is precisely this doctrine to which the name ‘materialistic interpretation of history’ or ‘historical materialism’ alludes, a name by which Marx and Engels tried to characterize the essence of their teaching. Such opinions are very common; but I have no doubt that they misinterpret Marx. Those who admire him for having held them, I may call Vulgar Marxists (alluding to the name ‘Vulgar Economist’ given by Marx to certain of his opponents2). The average Vulgar Marxist believes that Marxism lays bare the sinister secrets of social life by revealing the hidden motives of greed and lust for material gain which actuate the powers behind the scenes of history; powers that cunningly and consciously create war, depression, unemployment, hunger in the midst of plenty, and all the other forms of social misery, in order to gratify their ...

The stage of history, he taught, is set in a social system which binds us all; it is set in the ‘kingdom of necessity’. (But one day the puppets will destroy this system and attain the ‘kingdom of freedom’.)