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Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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We have a witness to this first breakdown of a nascent, opening society, a hostile witness whose own family was implicated in the treacherous reaction, namely Plato. Popper says his aim is "to present Plato as a totalitarian party-politician, unsuccessful in his immediate and practical undertakings, but in the long run only too successful in his propaganda for the arrest and overthrow of a civilization he hated." His Republic was a model for an authoritarian and immobile closed society. Popper also ties, quite unfairly, to pin a charge of historicism--the belief in laws of history that warrant prediction of the future--on Plato. The only credit Plato gets is that he, "with deep sociological insight, found that his contemporaries were suffering under a severe strain, and that this stain was due to the social revolution that had begun with the rise of democracy and individualism."

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Anti-Plato diatribes are an old tradition that periodically rediscovers itself with surprise (as with, not least, Georges Sorel's Le Proces de Socrate, 1889). Popper wrote his contribution to this tradition with the enthusiasm of one determined to scandalize the learned world. He succeeded hugely, and after fifty years his interpretation has survived as a one-sided but arguable presentation. What has been criticized is the fact that he raised only one instance of the crack-up of a society in transition, ancient Greece. In his second volume, "The High Tide of Prophecy", he had a field day exposing the historical necromancy of Hegel and Marx without ever suggesting that their historicism had anything to do with such events as unfolded in ancient Athens. Therefore, say critics, there is a "sociological deficit", a lack of evidence in Popper.

This rather misses the point. Popper was not practicing sociology and he was not a social scientist. (If he had been, he would have countered, as he argues in his many works on the philosophy of science, that science is not advanced by induction--by basing generalizations on a collection of instances--but by means of bold hypotheses that can then be submitted to attempts at falsification. This is a position within the philosophy of science that has been subjected to "shattering polemic" as fundamentally irrationalist, but this is not our concern here. (4) The point, rather, is that Popper was operating with the same psychological theory as Bergson: the primitive mentality of the closed society survives in Western man and surfaces again in times of stress. The revolution the Greeks began is still going on, forever threatened by the "perennial revolt against freedom." That is why he only needs one instance: "This struggle touches our feelings, for it is still going on within ourselves. Plato was the child of a time that is still our own." The strain of civilization "is still felt even in our own 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.... It is the price we have to pay for being human." Westerners do not have to live through experiences similar to those of the Athenians at the time of the first breakdown of a transitional society; it is enough for the going to get rough for them to suffer the same primitive emotions, to relive "the birth trauma of our civilization."

Popper's return engagement: The open society in an era of globalization

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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