The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics)

by Karl Popper

The politician who adopts this method may or may not have a blueprint of society before his mind, he may or may not hope that mankind will one day realize an ideal state, and achieve happiness and perfection on earth. But he will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant, and that every generation of men, and therefore also the living, have a claim;

The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good2

It is the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering.

the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship4.

We see now that the Utopian approach can be saved only by the Platonic belief in one absolute and unchanging ideal, together with two further assumptions, namely (a) that there are rational methods to determine once and for all what this ideal is, and (b) what the best means of its realization are. Only such far-reaching assumptions could prevent us from declaring the Utopian methodology to be utterly futile. But even Plato himself and the most ardent Platonists would admit that (a) is certainly not true; that there is no rational method for determining the ultimate aim, but, if anything, only some kind of intuition. Any difference of opinion between Utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.

What I criticize under the name Utopian engineering recommends the reconstruction of society as a whole, i.e. very sweeping changes whose practical consequences are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences.

the kind of experiment from which we can learn most is the alteration of one social institution at a time. For only in this way can we learn how to fit institutions into the framework of other institutions, and how to adjust them so that they work according to our intentions. And only in this way can we make mistakes, and learn from our mistakes, without risking repercussions of a gravity that must endanger the will to future reforms.

This—and not Utopian planning or historical prophecy—would mean the introduction of scientific method into politics, since the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes8.

In arguing against Utopianism, Marx condemns in fact all social engineering—a point which is rarely understood. He denounces the faith in a rational planning of social institutions as altogether unrealistic, since society must grow according to the laws of history and not according to our rational plans.

Both Plato and Marx are dreaming of the apocalyptic revolution which will radically transfigure the whole social world.

‘They will take as their canvas a city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their canvas clean—by no means an easy matter. But this is just the point, you know, where they will differ from all others. They will not start work on a city nor on an individual (nor will they draw up laws) unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves.’

‘All citizens above the age of ten’, Socrates answers, ‘must be expelled from the city and deported somewhere into the country; and the children who are now free from the influence of the manners and habits of their parents must be taken over. They must be educated in the ways [of true philosophy], and according to the laws, which we have described.

‘Whether they happen to rule by law or without law, over willing or unwilling subjects; … and whether they purge the state for its good, by killing or by deporting [or ‘banishing’] some of its citizens …—so long as they proceed according to science and justice, and preserve … the state and make it better than it was, this form of government must be declared the only one that is right.’

Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism

The one point in which I felt that my search for a refutation had succeeded concerned Plato’s hatred of tyranny.

my attempt to understand Plato by analogy with modern totalitarianism led me, to my own surprise, to modify my view of totalitarianism. It did not modify my hostility, but it ultimately led me to see that the strength of both the old and the new totalitarian movements rested on the fact that they attempted to answer a very real need, however badly conceived this attempt may have been.

I believe that Plato, with deep sociological insight, found that his contemporaries were suffering under a severe strain, and that this strain was due to the social revolution which had begun with the rise of democracy and individualism. He succeeded in discovering the main causes of their deeply rooted unhappiness—social change, and social dissension—and he did his utmost to fight them.

I believe that the medico-political treatment which he recommended, the arrest of change and the return to tribalism, was hopelessly wrong.

the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

A closed society at its best can be justly compared to an organism. The so-called organic or biological theory of the state can be applied to it to a considerable extent.

in an open society, many members strive to rise socially, and to take the places of other members. This may lead, for example, to such an important social phenomenon as class struggle. We cannot find anything like class struggle in an organism. The cells or tissues of an organism, which are sometimes said to correspond to the members of a state, may perhaps compete for food; but there is no inherent tendency on the part of the legs to become the brain, or of other members of the body to become the belly.

the so-called organic theory of the state is based on a false analogy.

the transition from the closed to the open society can be described as one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed.

The strain of civilization was beginning to be felt. This strain, this uneasiness, is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed society. It is still felt even in our day, especially in times of social change. It is the strain created by the effort which life in an open and partially abstract society continually demands from us—by the endeavour to be rational, to forgo at least some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, and to accept responsibilities.

Perhaps the most powerful cause of the breakdown of the closed society was the development of sea-communications and commerce.

democracy cannot be exhausted by the meaningless principle that ‘the people should rule’, but that it must be based on faith in reason, and on humanitarianism.

(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.)

The lesson which we thus should learn from Plato is the exact opposite of what he tries to teach us. It is a lesson which must not be forgotten. Excellent as Plato’s sociological diagnosis was, his own development proves that the therapy he recommended is worse than the evil he tried to combat. Arresting political change is not the remedy; it cannot bring happiness. We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society70

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.

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.

one important adjustment made by Aristotle in his systematization10 of Platonism. Plato’s sense of drift had expressed itself in his theory that all change, at least in certain cosmic periods, must be for the

worse; all change is degeneration. Aristotle’s theory admits of changes which are improvements; thus change may be progress.

According to Aristotle, one of the four causes of anything—also of any movement or change—is the final cause, or the end towards which the movement aims. In so far as it is an aim or a desired end, the final cause is also good. It follows from this that some good may not only be the starting point of a movement (as Plato had taught, and as Aristotle admitted12) but that some good must also stand at its end.

The Form or Idea, which is still, with Plato, considered to be good, stands at the end, instead of the beginning. This characterizes Aristotle’s substitution of optimism for pessimism.

Three historicist doctrines which directly follow from Aristotle’s essentialism may be distinguished. (1) Only if a person or a state develops, and only by way of its history, can we get to know anything about its ‘hidden, undeveloped essence’ (to use a phrase of

Hegel’s21). This doctrine leads later, first of all, to the adoption of an historicist method; that is to say, of the principle that we can obtain any knowledge of social entities or essences only by applying the historical method, by studying social changes.

(2) 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;

(3) In order to become real or actual, the essence must unfold itself in change. This doctrine assumes later, with Hegel, the following form24: ‘That which exists for itself only, is … a mere potentiality: it has not yet emerged into Existence … It is only by activity that the Idea is actualized.’

Aristotle followed Plato in distinguishing between knowledge and opinion27. Knowledge, or science, according to Aristotle, may be of two kinds—either demonstrative or intuitive. Demonstrative knowledge is also a knowledge of ‘causes’. It consists of statements that can be demonstrated—the conclusions—together with their syllogistic demonstrations (which exhibit the ‘causes’ in their ‘middle terms’). Intuitive knowledge consists in grasping the ‘indivisible form’ or essence or essential nature of a thing (if it is ‘immediate’, i.e. if its ‘cause’ is identical with its essential nature); it is the

originative source of all science since it grasps the original basic premises of all demonstrations.

Aristotle taught that we must assume that there are premises which are indubitably true, and which do not need any proof; and these he called ‘basic premises’. If we take for granted the methods by which we derive conclusions from these basic premises, then we could say that, according to Aristotle, the whole of scientific knowledge is contained in the basic premises,

A ‘basic premise’ is, according to him, nothing but a statement describing the essence of a thing. But such a statement is just what he calls29 a definition. Thus all ‘basic premises of proofs’ are definitions.

the defining formula must give an exhaustive description of the essence or the essential properties of the thing in question;

Now there can be little doubt that all these essentialist views stand in the strongest possible contrast to the methods of modern science. (I have the empirical sciences in mind, not perhaps pure mathematics.) First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it.

What we usually call ‘scientific knowledge’ is, as a rule, not knowledge in this sense, but rather information regarding the various competing hypotheses and the way in which they have stood up to various tests; it is, using the language of Plato and Aristotle, information concerning the latest, and the best tested, scientific ‘opinion’.

In science, we take care that the statements we make should never depend upon the meaning of our terms. Even where the terms are defined, we never try to derive any information from the definition, or to base any argument upon it. This is why our terms make so little trouble. We do not overburden them. We try to attach to them as little weight as possible. We do not take their ‘meaning’ too seriously. We are always conscious that our terms are a little vague (since we have learned to use them only in practical applications) and we reach precision not by reducing their penumbra of vagueness, but rather by keeping well within it, by carefully phrasing our sentences in such a way that the possible shades of meaning of our terms do not matter. This is how we avoid quarrelling about words.

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.

the tribal Idealism of Plato and Aristotle was exalted as a kind of Christianity before Christ. Indeed, this is the source of the immense authority of Plato and Aristotle, even in our own day, that their philosophy was adopted by medieval authoritarianism. But it must not be forgotten that, outside the totalitarian camp, their fame has outlived their practical influence upon our lives. And although the name of Democritus is seldom remembered, his science as well as his morals still live with us.

Hegel, the source of all contemporary historicism, was a direct follower of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle.

Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon.