The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics)

by Karl Popper

This book raises issues which may not be apparent from the table of contents. It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization—a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth—the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’, with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man.

it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.

It tries thereby to contribute to our understanding of totalitarianism,

A careful examination of this question has led me to the conviction that such sweeping historical prophecies are entirely beyond the scope of scientific method. The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.

There are, however, influential social philosophies which hold the opposite view. They claim that everybody tries to use his brains to predict impending events; that it is certainly legitimate for a strategist to try to foresee the outcome of a battle; and that the boundaries between such a prediction and more sweeping historical prophecies are fluid. They assert that it is the task of science in general to make predictions, or rather, to improve upon our everyday predictions, and to put them upon a more secure basis; and that it is, in particular, the task of the social sciences to furnish us with long-term historical prophecies. They also believe that they have discovered laws of history which enable them to prophesy the course of historical events. The various social philosophies which raise claims of this kind, I have grouped together under the name historicism.

Why do all these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deepfelt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection.

the full weight of this historical interpretation cannot be felt unless it is preceded by the material discussed earlier in the book. It seems that one has first to be disturbed by the similarity between the Platonic theory of justice and the theory and practice of modern totalitarianism before one can feel how urgent it is to interpret these matters.

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.

I have tried elsewhere to show that the historicist approach to the social sciences gives poor results.

the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.

In this doctrine, the law of historical development is laid down by the Will of God.

A naturalistic historicism, for instance, might treat the developmental law as a law of nature; a spiritual historicism would treat it as a law of spiritual development; an economic historicism, again, as a law of economic development.

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. Other forms which are no longer tribalist may still retain an element of collectivism1

The first Greek to introduce a more markedly historicist doctrine was Hesiod, who was probably influenced by oriental sources.

His interpretation of history is pessimistic. He believes that mankind, in their development down from the Golden Age, are destined to degenerate, both physically and morally.

Heraclitus was the philosopher who discovered the idea of change.

The speculative or metaphysical setting of Plato’s theory of social change has already been sketched. It is the world of unchanging Forms or Ideas, of which the world of changing things in space and time is the offspring.

‘Things are generated by participating in the Form, and they decay by losing the Form.’

Plato teaches that change is evil, and that rest is divine.

We see now that Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas implies a certain trend in the development of the world in flux. It leads to the law that the corruptibility of all things in that world must continually increase. It is not so much a rigid law of universally increasing corruption, but rather a law of increasing corruptibility; that is to say, the danger or the likelihood of corruption increases, but exceptional developments in the other direction are not excluded.

a very good soul may defy change and decay, and that a very evil thing, for instance a very evil city, m...

It then explains Hesiod’s5 pessimistic law of development, the law of historical decay.

it provides a theory of change. It explains the general direction of the flux of all sensible things, and thereby the historical tendency to degenerate shown by man and human society.

Another example is Plato’s sociological and economic historicism, his emphasis upon the economic background of the political life and the historical development; a theory revived by Marx under the name ‘historical materialism’.

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. This ideal city-state is so near perfection that it is hard to understand how it can ever change.

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’.

First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny … the fourth and final sickness of the city’10

The first form into which the perfect state degenerates, timocracy, the rule of the ambitious noblemen, is said to be in nearly all respects similar to the perfect state itself.

The main difference between the best or ideal state and timocracy is that the latter contains an element of instability; the once united patriarchal ruling class is now disunited, and it is this disunity which leads to the next step, to its degeneration into oligarchy.

With the establishment of the oligarchy, a state of potential civil war between the oligarchs and the poorer classes is reached:

This civil war begets democracy: ‘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 …’

Plato’s description of democracy is a vivid but intensely hostile and unjust parody of the political life of Athens,

In their stead he uses invective, identifying liberty with lawlessness, freedom with licence, and equality before the law with disorder.

The transition from democracy to tyranny, Plato says, is most easily brought about by a popular leader who knows how to exploit the class antagonism between the rich and the poor within the democratic state, and who succeeds in building up a bodyguard or a private army of his own.

The six types are arrived at, in the Statesman, by first distinguishing between three forms of government, the rule of one man, of a few, and of the many. Each of these is then subdivided into two types, of which one is comparatively good and the other bad, according to whether or not they imitate ‘the only true original’ by copying and preserving its ancient laws23. In this way, three conservative or lawful and three utterly depraved or lawless forms are distinguished; monarchy, aristocracy, and a conservative form of democracy are the lawful imitations, in order of merit. But democracy changes into its lawless form, and deteriorates further, through oligarchy, the lawless rule of the few, into a lawless rule of the one, tyranny, which, just as Plato has said in the Republic, is the worst of all.

Plato distinguishes three classes in his best state, the guardians, their armed auxiliaries or warriors, and the working class. But actually there are only two castes, the military caste—the armed and educated rulers—and the unarmed and uneducated ruled, the human sheep; for the guardians are no separate caste, but merely old and wise warriors who have been promoted from the ranks of the auxiliaries.

Plato tries to justify his class division by the threefold claim that the rulers are vastly superior in three respects—in race, in education, and in their scale of values.

(Before proceeding to this description, I wish to express my belief that personal superiority, whether racial or intellectual or moral or educational, can never establish a claim to political prerogatives, even if such superiority could be ascertained. Most people in civilized countries nowadays admit racial superiority to be a myth; but even if it were an established fact, it should not create special political rights, though it might create special moral responsibilities for the superior persons.

‘The race of the guardians must be kept pure’34, says Plato (in defence of infanticide), when developing the racialist argument that we breed animals with great care while neglecting our own race,

He demands that the same principles be applied to the breeding of the master race as are applied, by an experienced breeder, to dogs, horses, or birds. ‘If you did not breed them in this way, don’t you think that the race of your birds or dogs would quickly degenerate?’ Plato argues; and he draws the conclusion that ‘the same principles apply to the race of men’.

Not only poetry but also music in the ordinary sense of the term are to be controlled by a rigid censorship, and both are to be devoted entirely to strengthening the stability of the state by making the young more conscious of class discipline40, and thus more ready to serve class interests.

The description of a modern writer, who characterizes contemporary totalitarian education as ‘an intensified and continual form of mobilization’, fits Plato’s whole system of education very well indeed.

To sum up. In an attempt to understand and to interpret the changing social world as he experienced it, Plato was led to develop a systematic historicist sociology in great detail. He thought of existing states as decaying copies of an unchanging Form or Idea.

he needed a principle for distinguishing between the good or original or ancient traits of the existing institutions and their symptoms of decay. This principle he found in his law of political revolutions, according to which disunion in the ruling class, and their preoccupation with economic affairs, are the origin of all social change.

He developed a remarkably realistic historicist theory which found the cause of social change in Heraclitus’ disunion, and in the strife of classes in which he recognized the driving as well as the corrupting forces of history.

criticism of democracy, which he described as effeminate and degenerate.

An analysis of this development requires, I believe, a clear grasp of an important distinction. It is the distinction between (a) natural laws, or laws of nature, such as the laws describing the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets, the succession of the seasons, etc., or the law of gravity or, say, the laws of thermodynamics and, on the other hand, (b) normative laws, or norms, or prohibitions and commandments, i.e. such rules as forbid or demand certain modes of conduct; examples are the Ten Commandments or the legal rules regulating the procedure of the election of Members of Parliament, or the laws that constitute the Athenian Constitution.

A law of nature is unalterable; there are no exceptions to it. For if we are satisfied that something has happened which contradicts it, then we do not say that there is an exception, or an alteration to the law, but rather that our hypothesis has been refuted, since it has turned out that the supposed strict regularity did not hold, or in other words, that the supposed law of nature was not a true law of nature, but a false statement. Since laws of nature are unalterable, they can be neither broken nor enforced.

All this is very different if we turn to laws of the kind (b), that is, to normative laws. A normative law, whether it is now a legal enactment or a moral commandment, can be enforced by men. Also, it is alterable.

If it has any point or significance, then it can be broken; and if it cannot be broken then it is superfluous and without significance.