The Open Society and Its Enemies (Karl Popper)

In October 1958, the journalist and author Bryan Magee attended the presidential address at the Aristotelian Society in London, a talk “attended almost entirely by professional philosophers, many of them well known”. The speaker was the philosopher Karl Popper, and his topic was the idea that knowledge grows from the feedback process of criticism, something which originated with the pre-Socratic Greeks from Thales onwards. Magee watched with incredulous disbelief as the subsequent discussion missed Popper’s central point, focussing on the minutiae of his historical references, stating “instead of presenting his revolutionary idea head-on, he had presented it indirectly, in the form of a historical claim about the pre-Socratics”, and that, “he was presenting his ideas in a way that almost ensured they would be misunderstood”. 

This is certainly the case with his seminal work ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, written in New Zealand during World War II, as Popper (who was of Jewish descent) fled the Nazis from his home of Vienna. A polemic against totalitarianism, Popper attacks the ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx, attributing to them the intellectual roots of Stalinism and Nazism. Much of the subsequent criticism of The Open Society is a wounded defence of those great thinkers, rather than any true assessment of Popper’s thesis.

Primitive societies according to Popper, would not distinguish between natural laws and customs, since the two appeared entwined. Reliance on unexplainable natural phenomena such as weather gave importance to custom and passed-down, often mystical wisdom. Under such conditions, individual accountability for moral decisions and individual autonomy was low, and generally there was little questioning for the way in which things were done. This is what Popper calls a Closed Society. As populations grew, a Closed Society might establish ‘daughter settlements’ to handle increased populations, but geographical distance, and (especially) a tendency to trade would lead to customs being challenged. This describes Athens around 400BC, as a limited form of democracy emerged, and the pre-Socratic philosophers began to question all superstitions - the first moves toward an Open Society. Contrast this with Sparta at the time, who’s leaders sought to arrest change by shutting down all outsider or democratic influence, to avoid all trade, and to limit the size of the state. It is important to note that the fear of change (and its possible personal consequences) on behalf of the tribal leaders motivated such a regime. 

It is critical to point out that Popper’s objection to Closed Societies is epistemological rather than strictly political, and can be traced to his Philosophy of Science, his true passion. Arguably Popper’s greatest achievement was his proposed solution to the problem of induction, with his idea of falsification. Briefly, sceptical philosophers like Hume had shown that from a logical standpoint, no quantity of confirmatory evidence can actually prove the truth of a statement. Seeing the sun rise for 10,000 consecutive days, in no way proves that it will rise on day 10,001. This is the riddle of induction. As Bertrand Russell stated, a chicken may believe for 363 days that his master is a generous soul who feeds him every day, and on day 364 it is Christmas, and the generous master chops off his head. Popper’s solution is that we can’t ever prove anything to be true, but we can falsify a statement. The statement ‘all swans are white’ can never be proven by seeing additional white swans, but a single black swan will falsify the theory. If we create falsifiable statements and theories that tell us more about the world than their predecessors, our knowledge will progress. 

By this logic, knowledge doesn’t grow from passing down wisdom so much as the creative pursuit of falsifiable theories that better explain the world. Einstein's relativity didn’t build on Newton’s laws so much as explode them. Applying this ‘meta-rule’ to the political sphere, Popper attacks Plato, Hegel and Marx’s ‘Historicism’ - their propensity to look for patterns in social science and use them to ascribe predictive ‘laws’. The method Popper calls Historicism gives its creator the superficial likeness to science - but since these theories can never be refuted (or falsified), there can be no actual progress in using them. Instead he prescribes what is a simple definition of democracy. What states ought to do argues Popper, is to create a situation in which a bad leader can be removed without violence. The question should never be ‘who should rule’, but instead ‘how can we organise political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?’.

First in Popper’s crosshairs is Plato, student of Socrates and teacher to Aristotle, together the three most important ancient philosophers. Popper describes Plato as the greatest ever philosopher, but spares him no scorn. At face value, it is a reasonably simple matter to attribute some blame to Plato for the rise of totalitarianism. In The Republic, (the most widely read book of the most influential philosopher of all time), Plato advocates a society in which the Philosopher-King lies to the people, creating a fake ballot to favour the breeding of the ‘warrior class’, and creating a myth to justify segregation on racial lines. He states that all children over the age of 10 are to leave the city to create a ‘clean canvas’, and babies within the ruling class are to be separated from their parents at birth (with all adults living communally). Popper compares this ‘blank canvas’ radicalism with both Lenin and Hitler’s various acts to ‘purify, purge, expel, banish and kill.’ This he attributes to the idea of Utopian Engineering. It may seem natural to choose an ideal end goal for which a nation should aspire, and make all effort to reach that goal. The problem argues Popper, is that we are not aware in advance of how to reach that goal, and that radical reordering of society without such knowledge brings little benefit at enormous cost. Radical social engineering requires a powerful dictator, who must be deaf to the criticism of the disruption caused en route to the final goal; but since no complex society can know a priori how best to reach that goal, in practice such a leader will be deaf also to genuine, valid critical feedback. 

In short, the problem with a Utopian state is that one needs both a rational way to determine the best end goal, and a rational way to determine how to get there. Since neither exists, the direction will be chosen by some form of intuition or opinion - and so the chosen path is decided by power, and ultimately violence. Instead of Utopian Engineering, society should, argues Popper, practice Piecemeal Engineering. The trial of setting up an insurance company, or building a school or new roundabout will give us information as to its usefulness at little cost. We will explore this idea further when discussing Marx. 

Can we judge Plato by the standards of today, when he grew up in a society in which slavery was commonplace? Would it be reasonable to condemn Martin Luther King as an evil tyrant in fifty years time for eating red meat if, by then it was considered a despicable practice? The context in which Popper places Plato’s later writings indicate that we can. Socrates never wrote anything - we only know him from the writings of Plato (and some other of his contemporaries). Popper contrasts Socrates’ intellectual humility with Plato’s insistence on a ruling elite of philosopher kings, and calls it a betrayal of his teacher. In fact, he accuses Plato of outright deception in his writings, deceptions which have had lasting impact on the history of thought. 

In his treatment of the concept of ‘justice’, Plato performs, according to Popper, a sleight of hand. By conflating individualism with selfishness, and collectivism with altruism, he has created an intellectual tool to be used by future despots. Next, by asserting the importance of sovereignty - that ‘the best’ or ‘wisest’ should rule, Plato is openly espousing anti-democratic sentiments. 

Plato pointed out the ‘paradox of freedom and democracy’. If it is the will of the people to appoint a strongman dictator, democracy will end itself. This was apt in the 1940s, as Hitler’s assent was partially democratic. Popper counters that all forms of sovereignty are paradoxical - if we appoint ‘the wisest’ in their wisdom they could wish to appoint ‘the strongest’ or vice versa. 

Further, we can avoid the paradox of democracy by identifying ‘government that can be gotten rid of without bloodshed’ as our main ideal. This distinction is Popper’s definition of democracy versus tyranny. Simply, a government that can be peacefully gotten rid of. Therefore democracy should not be seen as ‘rule of the people’ so much as the choice of removable government over unremovable tyranny (however wise or benevolent it may be). 

It is the distaste for change, according to Popper, that drives Plato’s advocacy of an unchanging, ‘perfect’ state. Socrates was a friend to democracy by his constant challenging and questioning of it - a service that would be outlawed in Plato’s Republic. Because he is both a masterful essayist and unparalleled thinker, his historicism and utopianism have influenced countless others. Our inability to know the best future path can tempt us to long for a ‘philosopher king’ to absolve us of the responsibility of difficult decisions. “If our civilisation is to survive”, says Popper, “we must break with the habit of deference to great men.”

The second major target of Popper’s scorn is the German philosopher, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Writing from exile in New Zealand, it is claimed that Popper’s access to Hegel's material was limited; indeed many Hegel supporters state that Popper’s attacks are wide of the mark - both unfounded and unfair. From reading the book the link from Hegel’s philosophy to totalitarianism isn’t as clear cut as that of Marx and Plato. Much of Popper’s critique of Hegel is a personal attack. Briefly, Popper charges that Hegel has taken Kant’s extremely dense (yet coherent) writing style, and taken it yet further, deliberately using unintelligibility as a mask for charlatanism. Further, he contends that his pedestal is used to prop up Friedrich William III, his employer. Hegel’s assertion of the absolute moral authority of the state is, contends Popper, a sinister and intellectually corrupt act intended to prop up an undemocratic state. This is not unfounded. 

The great Philosopher Schopenhauer, who knew Hegel personally, stated “Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” Indeed, it is worth quoting Popper’s quote from Hegel in full, to illustrate quite how absurd his writings could be. Says Hegel, “Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this position;-merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real identity of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.-heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.” Popper calls this gibberish, and, the language barrier notwithstanding, it is difficult to disagree. 

The real question is whether or not this is important? If Hegel is a liar and a clown, whose success is based upon corruption, how has this contributed to the desperate state in which the world finds itself by the early 1940s? Again, we must return to epistemology. It is Hegel’s method of historicism to claim the central importance of the state that matters. If those sitting on an intellectual pedestal can claim to see historical trends, trends that predict future events, these can become a powerful force in and of themselves. An ‘intellectual fifth column of the state’, as Popper says. For if such predictions are unfalsifiable, then they can predict one direction or another, and can be corrupted. His idea of ‘progress’ of society, his dialectic argument that we are advancing, has an implicit moral implication - might is right. If a historicist like Plato believes in a starting state of perfection (his ‘Forms’), then what was past is what’s good, if Hegel’s historicist idea of ongoing progress is believed, then what is now is what is good, and if Marx’s historicist prediction of the future state of society is believed, then what is believed to be next is what is good. Popper’s point, beyond his firm belief in the inability of anyone to predict future trends (or even in their existence), is that our ethics cannot stem from the state of play - for why would what is right and wrong necessarily coincide with what is?

Finally, Popper turns to Marx. At a time when the Soviet Union was on the side of the allies, Popper dedicates at least a third of the book to comprehensively dismantling the ideas both of Karl Marx, and those he calls ‘Vulgar Marxists’. Popper’s method is particularly effective - he first lays out the opponent’s arguments in their strongest possible form, often improving them along the way, before refuting those arguments absolutely. There is no personal criticism of Marx in the way there was for Hegel - in fact Popper praises Marx for both his intentions and his remarkable insight. 

Significant space in the book is spent addressing and critiquing Marx’s specific labour theory of value, a derivation of 19th century Ricardian economics. To go into detail here would be to double the length of the review, and Popper himself states that if the theory were wrong (as he believes it to be), it still doesn’t invalidate Marx’s theory. Therefore we will omit that discussion.

In Capital, Marx isn’t blaming psychology for the world's problems; his is an institutional sociology - including his discussion of class war. This is in opposition to ‘vulgar marxists’ who assign sinister motives to groups. Marx’s argument is that the economic system itself traps both classes - those who live in forced servitude, and capitalists, who, trapped by competition, must always exploit the worker or be driven out of business. 

Marx says we are not free unless we escape the productive process- that our metabolism comes before our free mind (an inversion of Hegel - ‘the kingdom of freedom versus the kingdom of necessity). However, the way to escape is to use other people’s productivity for our own ends. And in this way there is no escape- since both oppressor and oppressed are trapped in class struggle. Therefore any period in history is defined by the economic system - ‘feudalism’, ‘capitalism’ etc. Individuals - capitalists and workers, cannot change the system consciously. The legal system according to Marx, is the apparatus by which one class uses force to oppress another, as part of the superstructure of economic society. The upshot is that since the means of production determine the state of play, political systems are impotent, or superficial. When they change they are a consequence not a cause of real change. Popper contends that whilst studying institutional class struggle is useful and worthwhile, it cannot be the sole explanation for the state of the world, for example, when emperors fought Popes in medieval history, this cannot be interpreted as oppressors fighting the oppressed. 

There are two key mistakes worth discussing here. Firstly, in Marx’s construction, political power is the third consideration, ranking after the evolution of machinery (or today, technology), and economic power. From the vantage point of the industrial revolution, this may have seemed natural to Marx. Even today, one can convincingly argue that money allows one to buy power. But in our dissatisfaction with the inequalities and corruption of the modern world, we cannot lose sight of the essential truth that no wealth can protect against political power in the final reckoning. The supposed power of the jews stemming from economic power was of no use in Germany under Nazi rule, nor the middle classes in general under Mao or Stalin. Even today the billionaire oligarchs of modern Russia are subject to Putin’s demands at pain of imprisonment. Centrally, Marxists have failed to sufficiently appreciate that power must be constrained in all its forms in order to avoid exploitation.

Leading on from this is the second critique, where Popper is most convincing. He has much sympathy, he says, with Marx’s strong opposition to “the most shameless and cruel exploitation”, which was “cynically defended by hypocritical apologists who appealed to the principle of human freedom”. In 1863 when Marx was writing Capital, he saw in England 7-year-olds performing 15 hours of labour a day, women dying after working 26 hours of straight work, and countless other horrors of exploitation, “defended not only by professional economists, but by churchmen”. It is no wonder says Popper, that Marx had no faith in either liberalism or parliamentary democracy. Popper’s genius is in invoking the Paradox Of Freedom. Freedom he says, defeats itself, if it gives the freedom of a strong man to bully a weak one. This must be extended to economic matters. I cannot use my economic power to put you into servitude. Your starvation does not give me licence to unrestrictedly use your labour. This cannot be remedied by the state ‘withering away’ as Marx put it, but by legal means, as with protection from rape or murder. 

This is critical, because it puts front and centre the opposing doctrines of Popper’s ‘Piecemeal Engineering’ with Marx’s ‘Utopian Engineering’. Whilst Marx predicted an increase in exploitation and misery as capitalism developed, the opposite, in fact occurred. The age at which one can work has been progressively raised, whilst the hours one can legally work progressively reduced. We have gone further still. All workers in England now have access to universal healthcare, education, disability and unemployment benefits and emergency housing. None of this required the overthrow of capitalism. The progress made argues Popper, is a result of democracies asking not ‘Who Should Rule?’ (remember this was Plato’s question, and in another form Marx’s, the answer being ‘The Proletariat’), but ‘how can we remove without violence bad rulers?’. By adhering to Popper’s question rather than Marx’s, progress has been slow but real. In fact, of the ten demands made in Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto, many don’t seem so revolutionary today; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax, central control of the state of the means of communication & transport, free education for all children, abolition of child’s factory labour. Looked at from the opposite point of view, Popper contends today that Laissez Faire has vanished from the face of the earth. Whilst adherents of Reaganism or Thatcherism may have called their brand of neo-liberal economics ‘laissez faire’, in truth those programmes bore no resemblance to the horrors of Marx’s time. 

One may conclude from subsequent events then, that the horrific aspects of capitalism witnessed by Marx were in fact a bug, not a feature. This is true even of the less controversial observations, such as the tendency to increased concentration in firm size (solved through legislation), and the worsening of trade cycles (solved by Keynesian and monetarist interventionism).

A perfunctory search for reviews of this book turns up bile from libertarians, disappointed that Popper was not an outright anti-government dogmatist in the manner of his friend Hayek, from philosophers for his attack not just on Plato and Hegel but on the profession’s obsession with language when there are real problems to solve, and from Marxists and communists of all kind, for the destruction of their entire thought system. Despite his reputation as a fearsome and often dogmatic intellectual, and especially despite the ferocity with which Popper attacks deceased and revered intellectuals, the most striking aspect of The Open Society and its Enemies is it’s...reasonableness. Popper was undoubtedly a genius, a genius who found himself an undeserving fugitive from the worst evil humankind had to offer. He took all his intellectual gifts, and argued with almighty power in favour of a calm, gradual, considered, reasonableness. He recognised the gains to be had in intellectual life from grand system-building prophets, and the damage such men could do. And he fought against them with logic and reason and truth. A book as prescient and important today as it was in 1944, for anyone with an interest in the wellbeing of society, this is the top of the list of must-reads.