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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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Hacohen's several references to science are judicious, for Popper conceived of the truly open society as modelled on the scientific community (or what he imagined the scientific community to be, which it probably is not): policies would be put forward the way scientists put up hypotheses, and political programs would be implemented in the spirit of experimental science, on a trial-and-error basis. For anything like that ever to happen, all the passions and interests of real politics would have to drain away. So they would have to before Popper's social engineering could be applied: it assumed that all social issues were basically technical problems that could be solved in a calm, rational trial-and-error way. That he proposed "piecemeal" rather than "utopian" engineering changes nothing; politics is not just engineering, and the open society will never be just a laboratory.

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"Like Kant", says a critic, "Popper is so deeply committed to a form of reductive and atomic individualism--refusing to grant even the existence, let alone the importance, of all forms of 'collective' behavior--that he is unable to provide anything but the 'thinnest' or most mechanical and instrumental--technological--interpretations of the institutions and traditions upon which the future of liberal societies depends." (10) In imagining the open society, Popper was under the influence of the Austrian socialists' Sozialtechnik and the bloodless politics of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists: the vision of a society that could reform itself scientifically and where science would determine ethics, politics and economics. Ironically, perhaps, it reminds one of the world of Plato's Republic at its worst.

A society as open and abstract as the one Popper sought sounds like a cold, draughty place to those of us who come still trailing clouds of partisan loyalty from the old closed society. Before every last one of us is divested of the attachments that made the old society cohesive and secure, we would have to undergo a moral transformation not far short of that mystical rebirth that Henri Bergson saw at the dawn of his open society. In the meantime, while sincerely preferring the open over the closed polity, most people would nevertheless shrink from a society as open, as abstract and as impersonal as Popper (and Hayek) conceived of.

(1.) Jiang Tianji and W.H. Newton-Smith, eds., Popper in China (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

(2.) Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong, eds., Popper's Open Society after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Karl Popper (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

(3.) Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(4.) D.C. Stove, Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982).

(5.) Jarvie and Pralong, pp. 71-2.

(6.) Popper, The Lesson of This Century, interviews with Giancarlo Bosetti (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

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

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Neil McInnes

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