Karl Popper · Philosophy
Popper’s political philosophy: reject the ancient question ‘who should rule?’ and its dream of wise philosopher-kings, and ask instead how to build institutions that let us remove bad rulers without bloodshed - and how to improve society by piecemeal reform rather than by imposing a utopian blueprint.
Karl Popper called The Open Society and Its Enemies his ‘war effort.’ He wrote it in exile in New Zealand between 1938 and 1943, as fascism engulfed Europe, convinced that the totalitarian catastrophe had deep intellectual roots reaching back to the greatest names in philosophy. At its centre is a contrast between two kinds of society. The closed society is tribal, magical, and collectivist: it binds its members in fixed customs and taboos, treats its social order as sacred and unalterable, and asks of the individual only obedience to ‘what has always been done.’ The open society is one in which individuals are set free to make personal decisions, to think critically, to question inherited custom, and to take responsibility for their own choices. The move from the closed to the open society - the release of the critical powers of the individual - was, Popper believed, one of the deepest and most painful revolutions in human history, and one that its enemies have never stopped trying to reverse.
The question ‘who should rule?’ seems innocent, even obvious - surely we want the best people in charge. But Popper argued it smuggles in a disastrous assumption: that political power is, and ought to be, essentially unchecked, so that the only real problem is filling the throne with the right occupant. Once you accept that framing, you are pushed toward the theory of sovereignty, toward concentrating power in the wisest hands and removing the obstacles in their way - and you have no answer at all to the inevitable case where the wise ruler turns out foolish or wicked, or is succeeded by someone who is. The question also flatters the fantasy that some class of people - the philosophers, the party, the enlightened - possesses a superior wisdom entitling them to rule the rest. Popper’s reframing punctures this. By asking instead how to constrain and replace rulers, he makes the fallibility of the powerful the starting point of politics, and the peaceful control of power, not the discovery of the ideal sovereign, the central task.
How, then, should we try to improve society? Popper contrasted two methods. Utopian engineering works from a blueprint of the ideal society: it aims at a distant, comprehensive goal, and seeks to remake the whole of society at a stroke to reach it. Piecemeal engineering is the humbler, experimental approach: it tackles concrete, specific evils - poverty, unemployment, disease, injustice - one reform at a time, watches the results, and corrects its mistakes as it goes. Popper argued decisively for the piecemeal method. We can achieve rough agreement about which evils are most urgent and press for their removal, but we cannot agree on any blueprint of perfect happiness, and we cannot know in advance whether a total transformation will work. The piecemeal engineer, like the scientist, proceeds by trial and error, keeping reforms small enough that their effects can be traced and their errors corrected - fighting against the greatest and most urgent evils rather than for some distant ultimate good.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Popper distinguished the ‘closed’ tribal society from the ‘open’ society of free individuals, replaced ‘who should rule?’ with ‘how can we get rid of bad rulers without violence?’, and preferred piecemeal social engineering to utopian engineering. Explain these ideas and why Popper thought the utopian…
Leads to Plato.
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