The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics)

by Karl Popper

At the back of all this is the hope of casting out the devil from our world. Plato thought he could do it by banishing him to the lower classes, and ruling over him. The anarchists dreamt that once the state, the Political System, was destroyed, everything must turn out well. And Marx dreamt a similar dream of banishing the devil by destroying the economic system. These remarks are not intended to imply that it is impossible to make even rapid advances, perhaps even through the introduction of comparatively small reforms, such as, for example, a reform of taxation, or a reduction of the rate of interest. I only wish to insist that we must expect every elimination of an evil to create, as its unwanted repercussion, a host of new though possibly very much lesser evils, which may be on an altogether different plane of urgency. Thus the second principle of sane politics would be: all politics consists in choosing the lesser evil (as the Viennese poet and critic K. Kraus put it). And politicians should be zealous in the search for the evils their actions must necessarily produce instead of concealing them, since a proper evaluation of competing evils must otherwise become impossible.