4 Democracy, society and individualism

In Unended Quest, Popper recounts how, as a politically conscious adolescent, he flirted with Communism. He was quickly disillusioned when he judged Communist actions irresponsible in leading to the deaths of some demonstrators. (Individual autonomy, responsibility, Socratic fallibilism and the obligation to reduce suffering are the keynotes of his scattered remarks about ethics.) In the 1920s he began a critique of Marx and Marxism, first tried out in a talk of 1935, ‘The Poverty of Historicism’. ‘Historicism’ is Popper’s name for the idea that there are inexorable laws of historical development: the demand that if natural science can predict eclipses then social science ought to be able to predict political revolutions. In a highly systematic way, Popper set out to show how both those who think the social sciences are not at all like the natural sciences (the ‘anti-naturalists’) and those who think the social sciences very like the natural sciences (the ‘naturalists’), share the aim of predicting history. Both recommend the methodology of historicism, which he sees as impoverished and inclined to treat societies as wholes responding to the pressures of inchoate social forces (see Historicism ).

Instead, Popper recommends ‘methodological individualism’: rules to the effect that the behaviour and actions of collectives should be explained by the behaviour of human individuals acting appropriately to the logic of their social situation as best they can and as best they see it. Not only was the alternative unfruitful, he argued, but the best social explanations of Plato and Marx were individualist. What look like holistic phenomena are to be explained as the ‘unintended consequences’ of such individual actions reverberating through the social set-up (see Holism and individualism in history and social science §1 ).

According to methodological individualism, social theories are tested not by historical predictions, which are little more than prophecies, Popper argues, but by attempts to invent institutions that correct social faults by social engineering. Man-made social institutions are hypotheses in action, he says. If we are to refute these hypotheses we need to avoid complicating matters with large-scale experiments, or too many at once, otherwise assessment will be impossible. For we must also reckon with the interference factor of ‘the Oedipus effect’, that is, the way in which a prediction about the future becomes an altering factor in the situation as human beings are aware of it, thus ‘interfering’ with the outcome.

The Open Society and Its Enemies was a ‘truly unintended consequence’ of an attempt to expand aspects of The Poverty of Historicism to satisfy puzzled friends. When it grew too large, Popper made it a separate work. On publication in 1945 it elevated him from academic obscurity to academic fame. He became a controversial and well-known public intellectual.

Described modestly as a ‘critical introduction to the philosophy of politics and of history’, The Open Society had become, in the seven years of its gestation, a major treatise on the intellectual and social ills of the time, offering an explanation of how totalitarianism had gained intellectual respectability and how purging post-war society of it would involve rethinking politics, education and social morality. Its title refers to two ideal-types used throughout. A closed society is one which takes a magical or tabooistic attitude to tradition and custom, which does not differentiate between nature and convention. An open society marks that difference and confronts its members with personal decisions and the opportunity to reflect rationally on them. Heraclitus, Aristotle and Hegel are briefly discussed, but the book’s two intellectual anti-heroes are Plato in volume 1 and Marx in volume 2.

The volume entitled ‘The Spell of Plato’ answers two questions: first, why Plato espoused totalitarian ideas and second, why students of Plato have whitewashed that fact and beautified him. The answer to the first question, a deeply sympathetic piece of writing, sketches a portrait of the young Plato contemplating with dismay the closed world of tribal Athens giving way to a more liberal and open society, with loss of social privilege and chaos arriving hand in hand. Popper insists on the brilliance of Plato’s sociological analysis of the causes of change and of his proposals to arrest it and staunch the deterioration it brings. In answer to the second, Popper courts controversy by suggesting that Plato’s intellectual followers, flattered by the role offered them, engaged in a long-running trahison des clercs by presenting as liberal and enlightened the doctrine of the philosopher king.

To expose the commitment of Plato and Platonists to totalitarianism, Popper had to clarify our ideals of a liberal and democratic social order and show how Plato indulges in persuasive definitions, while attempting to show that his totalitarian Republic is ‘just’. (Popper also mounts a general attack on the idea that philosophy should seek out the essence of universal words such as justice, democracy and tyranny. He argues that natural science uses the methodology of nominalism, not of essentialism, and social science and philosophy would do well to follow suit.) Mindful of Plato’s distaste for majority rule, as rule of the mob or rule of the worst, Popper carefully discusses tyranny, and concludes that the problem is not the question of what is popular, for certain kinds of tyrants are very popular and could easily be elected. So an open and liberal society is not to be identified with a popularly elected government. No more is it a matter of what is just, good or best, for none of these offers insurance against tyranny in their name. In line with his theory of science, and of knowledge generally, he proposes a via negativa. The issue is not what regime we want, but what to do about ones we do not want. The problem with tyranny is that the citizens have no peaceful way in which to rid themselves of it, should they want to. Popper proposes a now famous and generally endorsed criterion for democracy as that political system which permits the citizens to rid themselves of an unwanted government without the need to resort to violence. He exposes Plato’s question, ‘Who should rule?’, and all similar discussions of sovereignty as subject to paradoxes because the question permits an inconsistency to develop between the statement designating the ruler (for example, the best or wisest should rule) and what the ruler commands (for example, the best or wisest may then tell us: obey the majority, or the powerful). Popper noticed that the question carries the authoritarian implication that whoever is so named is entitled to rule. He replaces them with the practical question ‘how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?’, with its implication that rulers are on permanent parole. Popper’s is a fundamentally pessimistic view that all governments are to one extent or the other incompetent and potentially criminal in their misbehaviour, and that only a political system which allows them to govern at the sufferance of citizens who can withdraw their support readily is one with more or less effective checks against abuse. Even so, the fallibility of our institutional hypotheses enjoin upon us an eternal vigilance.

The second volume, ‘The High Tide of Prophecy, Hegel and Marx’, argues that the prophetic tendency in Heraclitus and Plato produced in Hegel a damaging incoherence and charlatanry, and in Marx a project for the scientific study of society that, despite noble emancipating aims, foundered, especially among the followers, on the confusion of prediction with unscientific historical prophecy and hence on a fundamental misconstruction of scientific method. The chapters on Marx are among the most penetrating commentaries ever written on him, and are both sympathetic in their appreciation and unremitting in their criticism. Although Popper clearly regards Plato as the deeper thinker, he argues that Marx has much to teach us about how moral and emancipatory impulses can go awry. Marxists and the radical experimenters of the Soviet Union are judged harshly, as are all forms of nationalism.

Appearing in 1945 just after the end of the war, a war that had forged an alliance with the Soviet Union, the book antagonized many powerful intellectual interest groups. Platonists were taken aback to be accused of being apologists for totalitarian tendencies in Plato (even though Popper was not the first to point these out) and Marxists were equally affronted. The aftermath was strange. Although Popper was at first widely read and indignantly denounced, it later became bad form among Marxists and classicists to mention him by name. Yet, to an extraordinary extent, in the following decades his work set the agenda for apologetic Platonists, Hegelians and Marxists. In many cases a book or article makes most sense when seen as covertly engaged in trying to confute some point Popper made in The Open Society .

As a teacher of philosophy, Popper displayed ambivalence: philosophical problems emerge from science (1962: ch. 2 ), so the best preparation was an education in a first- order subject, preferably scientific. In the classroom, he had the charisma of one possessed by intellectual problems, thinking about them all the time. In lecture or seminar he could be intellectually fierce and confrontational, in personal encounter sweet and encouraging. He regularly displayed an astonishingly quick intuitive grasp of the logic of any position presented to him, even from the most meagre of clues, and an eagerness to strengthen and elaborate on it before setting about criticizing it. He thus exemplified the values he advocated: intellectual seriousness, personal responsibility and disinterestedness, that is, doing justice to ideas regardless of their temporary embodiment. The failure of much critical commentary to meet these standards lies behind his complaint of misrepresentation. But there are also other reasons. If Popper is correct, not only is much in the traditional way of doing philosophy misdirected, but even the questions are wrongly put. Any attempt to map Popper’s ideas into traditionally oriented discussions risks misrepresentation. The frequent practice of reconstructing Popper’s philosophy timelessly, plucking materials from works published as far apart as fifty years, flies in the face of his emphasis on the structuring role of problems and problem-situations in all intellectual activity, particularly inquiry. To do justice to the originality and creativity of his work, scholarship needs in the first instance to respect its intellectual context of production.