#75: Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” Reconsidered

After a hiatus of some five decades, I’ve been revisiting Popper’s remarkable two-volume study entitled The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). I remembered that I was impressed by the work way back then, but little else of its detailed argumentation. Reading it now, I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate then just what an important work it really is. It is important not only for the light that Popper sheds on matters of older history, but for the light that Popper’s own presuppositions shed on our own very recent history.

This post will not be a review of the work in any sense, it will be focused just on making a few historical points. However, for those not familiar with the book, let me only say that it is concerned with identifying the two main intellectual sources of totalitarian ideology. Volume I is devoted to revising the then current “liberal” reading of Plato, whom Popper identifies as the “open society’s” first enemy. Volume II is devoted to Hegel and Marx, both of whom together count as its second enemy. All things considered, v. I is the more important, since seeing Marx, the main subject of v. II, as an enemy of individual freedom was scarcely ground shaking news. But calling Plato, the darling of academic leftists everywhere, a totalitarian, now that was indeed news. Because the effect of v. I was far larger than that of v. II, I will concentrate on it in this discussion.

Now, under the influence of Edmund Wilson I have generally traced modern socialism and communism back to the French revolution. On my own bat, I have extended this natural history back into the 17^th c, where the Enlightenment began and evolved into the worship of science and reason. But Popper had a larger view and found the roots of modern totalitarianism in a period as early as the third century b.c., in the thinking of one of philosophy’s most revered founding fathers, Aristocles, son of Aristides, better known to you as Plato.

Popper charges that Plato, contrary to popular belief, was a totalitarian in his theory and in his practical objectives, and that he was a propagandist for the creation of a totalitarian state. So far, so good. But, as one reads Popper from a 21^st c. point of view, one is constantly puzzled by his remarks. He is clearly against totalitarianism, but the contemporary reader has difficulty, I think, in identifying what he is for. The reason is this: the fact that he attacks Platonic as well has Marxist totalitarianism suggests that he must be for something like Classical Free Market Liberalism.

This guess falls afoul, however, of the fact that he also argues for social engineering (he tells us that the best statesman will approach his task like an engineer); that he is clearly hostile to religion (he considers it a primitive hold-over); and that he is committed to “social justice” (though it is admittedly unclear exactly what he means by this). All of this and more in Popper is incompatible with Free Market Liberalism. In addition, he believes in progress from less civilized societies to more, with “tribalism” specified as the low end of the continuum. Now, while tribalism usually implies loyalty to a person, rather than to codified laws, it also implies nationalism, the bogey of mid-century progressives. Thus, he is hostile to nationalism. In fact, as I’ve argued before, the post WW II progressives were united in blaming the war on Germany’s nationalism, rather than its Socialism. These are all marks of what we think of today as “Liberalism” or “Progressivism”, which is quite the opposite of Free Market Liberalism, and, finally, he explicitly identifies himself as a “Progressive”.

There is therefore a puzzle here. He likes neither Plato nor Marx, but his likes seem to exclude the only obvious alternative, namely Classical Free Market Liberalism. What is Popper for?

Popper obviously does not mean by “Progressive” what we mean by it today. Precisely what he means by “Progressive” becomes clearer when we look at the other word he uses to describe Plato and his philosophy, the word “Collectivist.”

The precise character of Plato’s philosophy that Popper objects to is that in it, the individual exists for the sake of the state, while in his “Progressivism,” the state exists for the sake of the individual!

We have become so accustomed to our current Progressivism that we assume quite automatically that any “Progressivism” will make the individual subordinate to the state, but this is clearly an unwarranted assumption. What Popper’s discussion suggests is that there is no necessary incompatibility between respecting the individual and having progressive objectives like the ones I listed earlier. It also suggests that there were actually two progressive streams in competition until at least the end of World War II, one of which accepted progressive values but rejected Collectivism, and one which accepted progressive values (ostensibly) and accepted Collectivism. Popper clearly rejected the latter stream in both its Nazi-style and its Stalinist incarnations. What Popper represented was an offshoot of Enlightenment Rationalism that is rarely seen today, an offshoot that used to be called “Humanism.” What he wanted, for the sake of a more informative name, was an “Individualist Progressivism” (or “Individualism,” for short).

This calls for a couple of critical remarks.

First, and perhaps less important, when Popper describes the difference between Collectivism and Individualist Progressivism, he invokes the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. He says that Collectivism does not respect the individual, but that Kant’s ethics does. His choice, however, is an interesting one, since Kant can equally be blamed for the later successes of collectivism. After all, there would have been no Hegel without Kant, and there would have been no Marx without Hegel.

Popper focuses exclusively on one of the versions of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Treat each man as an end in himself (not as a means to an end) as proof that Kant was an Individualist Progressive. The example often given of this principle is that of the life-boat conundrum: is it right to dump the person with the least hope of survival overboard so that the chances of those remaining be improved. The Kantian answer to this is clearly “no.” But this is really a bit of a red herring. If this is the whole meaning of this version of the Categorical Imperative, then Kant is certainly not giving the Individualist what he wants.

What the Individualist wants is that every man have his idiosyncratic needs and wants respected, regardless of how useful it might be to others to ignore them. Now, this would indeed be an Individualistic ethic. But can we derive this kind of ethic from the Categorical Imperative? I don’t know, but the answer becomes tediously uninteresting once we remember that Kant’s ethic is the ethic of a fictional individual, the “moral agent,” who does not exist and has never existed. This Kantian “moral agent” is supposedly purely rational and has no needs or wants. This creature’s ethic is supposed to be an expression of its rationality, which is its essence.

This means that emotions and physical wants and needs are not counted as “parts” of a moral agent, they are rather forces acting against the agent’s true self, they are actually enemies of his rationality. The implication of this is that if the world consisted only of Kantian moral agents, these agents would all be identical, they would be indistinguishable from each other, for one purely rational being is exactly the same as any other, just as any calculator will give identical results on identical sums. Thus, the “respect for individuality” that Popper discovers in the Categorical Imperative loses most, if not all, of its moral usefulness. For if we are really like Kant’s moral agents, then we don’t actually have any wants and needs, nor do we have an individuality to respect (other than purely numerical), and if we are not like them, then the principle applies only to beings who don’t exist.

I suppose it’s hard for Popper to admit this since he shares Kant’s and the Enlightenment’s blind confidence in the power of human reason.

Second, while there may be no necessary incompatibility between Individualism and progressive objectives, there does seem to be a powerful, if not inexorable, inclination for any Progressivism to evolve in the direction of Collectivism. The U.S., for example, seems currently to be in an ambiguous posture vis a vis Collectivism, and its ongoing health care debate illustrates the kind of drift of which I speak. While the U.S. actually incorporates respect for the individual very strongly in its constitution, the existence of a nascent government controlled health care system has already evoked arguments in which the individual’s needs and wants are subordinated to that of “the community.” As soon as the community pays for services, the community acquires a dominant voice in the setting of policy. Thus, for example, if you, the individual, want to be a fat, lazy, smoker, then either your medical benefits will have to be adjusted down or you will have to be penalized with higher payments. After all, your decisions affect the community, and the community comes first! My point is that the only way that even Individualism can move towards its progressive goals is that of social engineering, that social engineering involves state intervention, and that state intervention inevitably makes the interests of the collective trump the interests of the individual.

So, the first point I have been interested in making is that there used to exist a distinct species of Progressivism that existed side by side with Collectivism and that differed from Collectivism by its commitment to a respect for the complete individual, needs, wants, and idiosyncrasies included. Interestingly, this species seems to have lost to Collectivism in the evolutionary competition of political doctrines. The only representative I can still find of Individualistic Progressivism is the writer Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Socialist. One suspects that his rejection of Socialism might well have been based on his recognition that Collectivism does not respect the individual.

This is a form of Progressivism with which one could agree to disagree, a member, as it were, of a loyal opposition; a loyal opposition that is naïve, but well intentioned. Collectivism, on the other hand, is an attack on values that are so fundamental that its advocates can only be seen as hostile to the state, and they must be fought with any means available.

The second point involved the two criticisms that seemed to me might aid a reader in coming to terms with Popper’s text.

One can only speculate why it is that Collectivism has emerged the victor in this fatal struggle between Individualism and Collectivism, but the most obvious reason might also very well be the right one. Collectivism might be better in the survival game precisely because it does not respect the individual, for this means that there are no limits to what it can do in order to win. Respect for the individual may be something that we in Western democracies value, but in the street brawl of “isms” through the decades and centuries, it is nothing more than a handicap. As many a romantic and idealist has discovered, it is very easy to be “in the right” and yet wind up dead.