The Open Society and Its Enemies

by Karl Popper

Indeed, he said as late as 1976 that he would have remained a socialist all his life if he had thought that it was possible to reconcile socialist egalitarianism with freedom.

Science is a ‘trial and error’ learning process, and one of the virtues of an open society is its ability to learn from experience. Closed societies resist novelty and therefore pass up the chance to learn from experience.

In retrospect it was easy to see that the socialists had made a crucial error in arming themselves sufficiently to frighten their enemies, though without seriously intending to fight. Their opponents were all too ready to fight, and much better organised. By the time of the Nazi accession to power in Germany in 1933, the Austrian socialists were entirely on the defensive.

Plato, the target of the first volume of The Open Society, stands for all those who claim that they have an unchallengeable insight into the nature of things;

The first is that Popper was an early proponent of the thought that a liberal society has no duty to tolerate the intolerant.

Anyone demanding toleration for the free expression of their views must allow the same toleration to the expression of views with which they disagree; conversely, the intolerant cannot expect toleration.

Radical students campaigning on the basis of ‘no platform for racists’ have in the United Kingdom frequently silenced speakers at public events, usually to the benefit of the speakers’ cause rather than their own. The view that only immediate self-defence or the need to prevent a breach of the peace are grounds for silencing someone allows the obnoxious more opportunity to offend their hearers, but it may prove a policy less liable to abuse. Popper’s position was not grounded in any elaborate theory of rights, but in his sense that the enemies of liberal democracy had taken advantage of its freedoms to undermine it in the twenties and thirties. This was not an uncommon reaction among his contemporaries.

Sound familiar?

It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.

The prophets who prophesy the coming of a millennium may give expression to a deep-seated feeling of dissatisfaction; and their dreams may indeed give hope and encouragement to some who can hardly do without them. But we must also realize that their influence is liable to prevent us from facing the daily tasks of social life. And those minor prophets who announce that certain events, such as a lapse into totalitarianism (or perhaps into ‘managerialism’), are bound to happen may, whether they like it or not, be instrumental in bringing these events about.

A further motive, it seems, can be found if we consider that historicist metaphysics are apt to relieve men from the strain of their responsibilities. If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them.

While the ordinary man takes the setting of his life and the importance of his personal experiences and petty struggles for granted, it is said that the social scientist or philosopher has to survey things from a higher plane. He sees the individual as a pawn, as a somewhat insignificant instrument in the general development of mankind. And he finds that the really important actors on the Stage of History are either the Great Nations and their Great Leaders, or perhaps the Great Classes, or the Great Ideas. However this may be, he will try to understand the meaning of the play which is performed on the Historical Stage; he will try to understand the laws of historical development. If he succeeds in this, he will, of course, be able to predict future developments. He might then put politics upon a solid basis, and give us practical advice by telling us which political actions are likely to succeed or likely to fail. This is a brief description of an attitude which I call historicism.

Historicism, which I have so far characterized only in a rather abstract way, can be well illustrated by one of the simplest and oldest of its forms, the doctrine of the chosen people.

This doctrine is one of the attempts to make history understandable by a theistic interpretation, i.e. by recognizing God as the author of the play performed on the Historical Stage.

There is no doubt that the doctrine of the chosen people grew out of the tribal form of social life. Tribalism, i.e. the emphasis on the supreme importance of the tribe without which the individual is nothing at all, is an element which we shall find in many forms of historicist theories.

chosen people is the remoteness of what it proffers as the end of history. For although it may describe this end with some degree of definiteness, we have to go a long way before we reach it. And the way is not only long, but winding, leading up and down, right and left. Accordingly, it will be possible to bring every conceivable historical event well within the scheme of the interpretation. No conceivable experience can refute it.

An attack upon this form of historicism should therefore not be interpreted as an attack upon religion. In the present chapter, the doctrine of the chosen people serves only as an illustration. Its value as such can be seen from the fact that its chief characteristics3 are shared by the two most important modern versions of historicism, whose analysis will form the major part of this book—the historical philosophy of racialism or fascism on the one (the right) hand and the Marxian historical philosophy on the other (the left).

For the chosen people racialism substitutes the chosen race (of Gobineau’s choice), selected as the instrument of destiny, ultimately to inherit the earth. Marx’s historical philosophy substitutes for it the chosen class, the instrument for the creation of the classless society, and at the same time, the class destined to inherit the earth.

‘Everything is in flux and nothing is at rest’, is the motto of his philosophy.

Heraclitus

‘They said: nobody shall be the best among us; and if someone is outstanding, then let him be so elsewhere, and among others.’ This hostility towards democracy breaks through everywhere in the fragments: ‘… the mob fill their bellies like the beasts … They take the bards and popular belief as their guides, unaware that the many are bad and that only the few are good

Do I disagree with this? Not much...

‘Everything is in flux’, he said; and ‘You cannot step twice into the same river.’ Disillusioned, he argued against the belief that the existing social order would remain for ever: ‘We must not act like children reared with the narrow outlook “As it has been handed down to us”.’

law of destiny.

Destiny is historicism in different clothes

‘One must not act and talk as if asleep … Those who are awake have One common world; those who are asleep, turn to their private worlds … They are incapable both of listening and of talking … Even if they do hear they are like the deaf. The saying applies to them: They are present yet they are not present … One thing alone is wisdom: to understand the thought which steers everything through everything.’

‘One must follow what is common to all … Reason is common to all … All becomes One and One becomes All … The One which alone is wisdom wishes and does not wish to be called by the name of Zeus … It is the thunderbolt which steers all things.’

From this philosophy springs a theory of the driving force behind all change; a theory which exhibits its historicist character by its emphasis upon the importance of ‘social dynamics’ as opposed to ‘social statics’.

so much that is characteristic of modern historicist and anti-democratic tendencies. But apart from the fact that Heraclitus was a thinker of unsurpassed power and originality, and that, in consequence, many of his ideas have (through the medium of Plato) become part of the main body of philosophic tradition,

It seems as if historicist ideas easily become prominent in times of great social change.

They appeared when Greek tribal life broke up, as well as when that of the Jews was shattered by the impact of the Babylonian conquest13. There can be little doubt, I believe, that Heraclitus’ philosophy is an expression of a feeling of drift; a feeling which seems to be a typical reaction to the dissolution of the ancient tribal forms of social life.

Plato summed up his social experience, exactly as his historicist predecessor had done, by proffering a law of historical development. According to this law, which will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration.

The social engineer does not ask any questions about historical tendencies or the destiny of man. He believes that man is the master of his own destiny and that, in accordance with our aims, we can influence or change the history of man just as we have changed the face of the earth. He does not believe that these ends are imposed upon us by our historical background or by the trends of history, but rather that they are chosen, or even created, by ourselves, just as we create new thoughts or new works of art or new houses or new machinery.

As in many primitive religions, some at least of the Greek gods are nothing but idealized tribal primogenitors and heroes—personifications of the ‘virtue’ or ‘perfection’ of the tribe.

the theory of Forms or Ideas has at least three different functions in Plato’s philosophy. (1) It is a most important methodological device, for it makes possible pure scientific knowledge, and even knowledge which could be applied to the world of changing things of which we cannot immediately obtain any knowledge, but only opinion. Thus it becomes possible to enquire into the problems of a changing society, and to build up a political science. (2) It provides the clue to the urgently needed theory of change, and of decay, to a theory of generation and degeneration, and especially, the clue to history. (3) It opens a way, in the social realm, towards some kind of social engineering; and it makes possible the forging of instruments for arresting social change, since it suggests designing a ‘best state’ which so closely resembles the Form or Idea of a state that it cannot decay.

I use the name methodological essentialism to characterize the view, held by Plato and many of his followers, that it is the task of pure knowledge or ‘science’ to discover and to describe the true nature of things, i.e. their hidden reality or essence.

My attitude towards historicism is one of frank hostility, based upon the conviction that historicism is futile, and worse than that. My survey of the historicist features of Platonism is therefore strongly critical. Although I admire much in Plato’s philosophy, far beyond those parts which I believe to be Socratic, I do not take it as my task to add to the countless tributes to his genius. I am, rather, bent on destroying what is in my opinion mischievous in this philosophy. It is the totalitarian tendency of Plato’s political philosophy which I shall try to analyse, and to criticize.

many of his thoughts were taken so much for granted that they were simply absorbed unconsciously and therefore uncritically.

According to the Republic, the original or primitive form of society, and at the same time, the one that resembles the Form or Idea of a state most closely, the ‘best state’, is a kingship of the wisest and most godlike of men.

According to Plato, internal strife, class war, fomented by self-interest and especially material or economic self-interest, is the main force of ‘social dynamics’. The Marxian formula ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle’8 fits Plato’s historicism nearly as well as that of Marx.

the rule of liberty which means lawlessness;

between Sparta and the perfect state, Plato became one of the most successful propagators of what I should like to call ‘the Great Myth of Sparta’—the perennial and influential myth of the supremacy of the Spartan constitution and way of life.)

‘Democracy is born … when the poor win the day, killing some …, banishing others, and sharing with the rest the rights of citizenship and of public offices, on terms of equality