The Open Society and Its Enemies

by Karl Popper

he experiences the tribal community as a child experiences his family and his home, in which he plays his definite part; a part he knows well,

he could not disguise his sympathies with their fundamental aim—to arrest social change, and to fight the universalistic imperialism of the Athenian democracy

Islamic State against US

To admit one’s poverty is no disgrace with us; but we consider it disgraceful not to make an effort to avoid it.

Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom.

The rise of philosophy itself can be interpreted, I think, as a response to the breakdown of the closed society and its magical beliefs. It is an attempt to replace the lost magical faith by a rational faith;

(Democrats who do not see the difference between a friendly and a hostile criticism of democracy are themselves imbued with the totalitarian spirit. Totalitarianism, of course, cannot consider any criticism as friendly, since every criticism of such an authority must challenge the principle of authority itself.)

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.

He transfigured his hatred of individual initiative, and his wish to arrest all change, into a love of justice and temperance, of a heavenly state in which everybody is satisfied and happy and in which the crudity of money-grabbing67 is replaced by laws of generosity and friendship.

anti capitalistic

collectivism, is the product as well as the symptom of the lost group spirit of tribalism68. It is the expression of, and an ardent appeal to, the sentiments of those who suffer from the strain of civilization.

He did not succeed in arresting social change. (Only much later, in the dark ages, was it arrested by the magic spell of the Platonic-Aristotelian essentialism.)

Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic.

if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.

Plato was led, by his distrust of the common man, and by his ethical collectivism, to approve of violence;

and / or coercion

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.

his theory of change lends itself to historicist interpretations, and that it contains all the elements needed for elaborating a grandiose historicist philosophy. (This opportunity was not fully exploited before Hegel.)

Change, by revealing what is hidden in the undeveloped essence, can only make apparent the essence, the potentialities, the seeds, which from the beginning have inhered in the changing object. This doctrine leads to the historicist idea of an historical fate or an inescapable essential destiny;

whatever may befall a man, a nation, or a state, must be considered to emanate from, and to be understandable through, the essence, the real thing, the real ‘personality’ that manifests itself in this man, this nation, or this state.

This essentialistic interpretation is very similar to confucian thought of causality.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory. (What may occur, however, are refutations of scientific theories.) On the other hand, pure mathematics and logic, which permit of proofs, give us no information about the world, but only develop the means of describing it.

In physical measurements, for instance, we always take care to consider the range within which there may be an error; and precision does not consist in trying to reduce this range to nothing, or in pretending that there is no such range, but rather in its explicit recognition.

An important posture to inescapable risks in this world.

the strength of the early Christians lay in their moral courage. It lay in the fact that they refused to accept Rome’s claim ‘that it was entitled to compel its subjects to act against their conscience’

Men believed God to rule the world. This belief limited their responsibility. The new belief that they had to rule it themselves created for many a well-nigh intolerable burden of responsibility.

no change->changing (lost victory of open soceity) trying to arrest all changes->God wills it->pre-determined course->our actions

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.

he represents the ‘missing link’, as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel,

we can know the essence and its ‘potentialities’ only from its ‘actual’ history. Thus we arrive at the fundamental position of historicist method, that the way of obtaining knowledge of social institutions such as the state is to study its history, or the history of its ‘Spirit’.

Hegel, more particularly, even had the audacity to patronize Kant for ‘reviving the name of Dialectics, which he restored to their post of honour’.

Plato did the same to Socrates.

Prussian absolutism knew no constitutional law (apart from such principles as the full sovereignty of the king) and that the slogan of the campaign for democratic reform in the various German principalities was that the prince should ‘grant the country a constitution’.

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.

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. The principle of the national state is not only inapplicable but it has never been clearly conceived. It is a myth. It is an irrational, a romantic and Utopian dream, a dream of naturalism and of tribal collectivism.

There was a good deal of romantic collectivism in this invention, but no tendency towards nationalism. But Rousseau’s theories clearly contained the germ of nationalism, whose most characteristic doctrine is that the various nations must be conceived as personalities.

Hegel knew that his task was to combat the liberal and even the imperialist leanings of nationalism.

Plato attacked Athenian imperialism or cosmopolitanism.

Hegel introduced the historical theory of the nation. A nation, according to Hegel, is united by a spirit that acts in history.

racialism substitutes for Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of ‘Spirit’, Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of ‘Spirit’, Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of its ‘Spirit’, the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.

Kolnai rightly stresses the connection between racialism (it is fate that makes one a member of one’s race) and hostility to freedom: ‘The principle of Race’, Kolnai says82, ‘is meant to embody and express the utter negation of human freedom, the denial of equal rights, a challenge in the face of mankind.’ And he rightly insists that racialism tends ‘to oppose Liberty by Fate, individual consciousness by the compelling urge of the Blood beyond control and argument’.

From Rousseau onwards, the Romantic school of thought realized that man is not mainly rational. But while the humanitarians cling to rationality as an aim, the revolt against reason exploits this psychological insight into the irrationality of man for its political aims.

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 method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of the open society.

the plausible argument that science can predict the future only if the future is predetermined—if, as it were, the future is present in the past, telescoped in it—led him to adhere to the false belief that a rigidly scientific method must be based on a rigid determinism.

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 thus forced, whether it likes it or not, to operate with the idea of a beginning of society, and with the idea of a human nature and a human psychology as they existed prior to society.

If a reduction is to be attempted at all, it would therefore be more hopeful to attempt a reduction or interpretation of psychology in terms of sociology than the other way round.

their creation affects not only many other social institutions but also ‘human nature’—hopes, fears, and ambitions, first of those more immediately involved, and later often of all members of the society.

the moral values of a society—the demands and proposals recognized by all, or by very nearly all, of its members—are closely bound up with its institutions and traditions, and that they cannot survive the destruction of the institutions and traditions of a society

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 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.

people who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against non-existing conspirators. For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the Devil, who has a vested interest in hell.

all social phenomena, and especially the functioning of all social institutions, should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc., of human individuals, and that we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives’ (states, nations, races, etc.).

The mistake of psychologism is its presumption that this methodological individualism in the field of social science implies the programme of reducing all social phenomena and all social regularities to psychological phenomena and psychological laws. The danger of this presumption is its inclination towards historicism,

those actually in power at the moment of victory—those of the revolutionary leaders who have survived the struggle for power and the various purges, together with their staff—will form a New Class: the new ruling class of the new society, a kind of new aristocracy or bureaucracy

Princelings of PRC

all over the earth, organized political power has begun to perform far-reaching economic functions. Unrestrained capitalism has given way to a new historical period, to our own period of political interventionism, of the economic interference of the state.

the use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and it should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.

A violent revolution which tries to attempt more than the destruction of tyranny is at least as likely to bring about another tyranny as it is likely to achieve its real aims.