The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash.
Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosopher Kings is given inside of a conditional---the condition being: those leaders must be True Philosophers; where True Philosophers know the Good and thus know (in a nearly omniscient-like way) what is best for everyone (and act accordingly). It is left wide open whether such True Philosophers even exist, thus it is left wide open whether such a social organization would ever work in reality.
Plato's other political dialogues, like Statesman and The Laws, are much much less utopian and "authoritarian" and deal with very practical political issues. It would be weird to be an authoritarian utopist and then go and write dialogues like those.
Comment approved by my wife, who is a Plato scholar. Your point that whether True Philosophers even exist is left open is the kind of problem she points out all the time in dogmatic interpretations. It sounds basic, but it's so important to keep in mind that just because a character says something (even if that character is Socrates), that doesn't mean it's the "view" of the dialogue. And you have to be careful to pin down exactly what is being claimed, as you point out with the conditional. Plato is a master (surely one of the greatest of all time) of creating a dynamic space to think in without settling the questions raised.
Saying Plato is "just asking questions" seems like a cop-out, he's responsible for what he implies, whatever character he makes say it. How about the allegory of the cave? The roots of fallibilism could be traced to that allegory - except for the part about philosophers, who are the ones who have escaped the cave and have seen the sun, implying that they gain access to the absolute truth.
Is every author who wishes to convey certain messages to their audience through narrative also responsible for every single thing his characters say? Character-driven narrative would seem to be at odds with such a view.
I was wondering about that too. But what I mean by "responsibility" is that the ideas presented have a definite form and don't get to evade criticism by being mercurial and shape-shifting. Not sure about art, like fiction. I'm not seeking to prevent authors from being ambiguously provocative, but it's a crappy way to reason.
In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance,
formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be honest.
Not sure how that's possible. Laws may have a lot of strict marriage laws, but in Republic there is no marriage, the state assigns you sex partners in a rigged lottery, and requires the participants to be wearing masks so they can't form anything like an emotional bond. Really.
I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.
Having more data and being able to consistency process it actually can say a lot about the hypotheses that linguists have. All other science is evidence-based. The challenge for linguistics has been that many theorists pick and choose armchair examples rather than back their assertions up with statistical validity.
Whether or not the Republic ever reflected Plato's ideas about government, James Romm's recent book "Plato and the Tyrant" makes a compelling case that Plato changed his mind after trying to teach virtue and create a Philosopher King in Syracuse. His last book instead advocated for the rule of law (and was appropriately titled "The Laws")
> the principle of fallibilism: Truths are only true if they are verified through the give and take of experience and experiment.
I think Popper would object to the phrase "truths are only true if they are verified". We don't knowingly verify truths. The things we think are truths aren't even true, they're just not false (yet).
Given the argument tactics employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, which include most of the standard catalog of fallacies, the question that arises in the mind of many readers is "why didn't they kill him sooner?"
I was first exposed to Popper in my first year in university, in an introductory course to epistemology, and I liked him right away. I've carried Refutability and the Paradox of Tolerance with me ever since.
By the way David Deutsch could be reasonably said to be Popper's biggest fan. If you're interested in Deutsch and Popper you could do worse than picking up "The Beginning of Infinity" to get acquainted with both, it's a great book.
What if a society's collapse is a feature of progress, not a failure of it? Popper argues that open societies thrive on questioning and closed ones stagnate by suppressing it. But this introduces the contradiction that openness can't be preserved by any fixed set of rules as rules rigid enough to structure a society inevitably devolves the openness they're meant to protect.
The optimistic read of that problem is that the devolution is itself the corrective. Athens outpaces Sparta through openness, devolves, falls. Rome's republic succeeds it, devolves, falls. Promoting growth is then: promote openness as a principle and accept that when a society devolves, its failure clears the way for selection for increased openness.
It seems to me that the open society is in a perpetual state of trying to outrun an endless sequence of problems: would-be invaders from closed societies, internal activists who would rather close down the society in the name of stability, exhaustion of resources on the planet, solar system, and so on, the inevitable asteroid impact or supernova, etc.
And the idea is that this endless sequence of problems exists regardless of how open your society is. So even if you were able to implement a perfect set of authoritarian rules to establish a stable closed society with the technology to capture all the resources from the solar system and redirect all dangerous asteroids, well crap, you still weren't innovative enough to stop the supernova from killing everyone 200 million years later.
Worth noting that Popper himself would probably reject this as he explicitly argues history has no meaning or direction. I'm inclined to see this view as in tension with the idea that openness promotes growth combined with the idea that growth is self-selecting
I was likely being too definitive there. I think there is a strong tension between rules rigid enough to structure a society and maintaining a principle of openness. I think optimistically allowing for failures of various kinds (one could imagine it at a lower level than the entire society) allows for a more robust pursuit of openness.
Also worth reading, I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates” that sets the context. TL:DR Socrates was deeply involved with a group of Quisling aristocrats who briefly overthrew democracy with Sparta’s help. Athens’ withdrawal agreement with Sparta stipulated amnesty for the collaborators, so they used the roundabout prosecution. They were not going to execute him, just strip him of his civic rights, but his arrogant conduct during the trial so incensed the jurors that more voted for the death penalty than had voted to convict him.
Otherwise, it’s important to remember Plato sock-puppets Socrates, who had no truck with the newfangled and subversive invention of writing and thus could not correct the record. What is clear is that Plato, a disgruntled aristocrat himself, exiled for being part of the quisling faction, was a proto-fascist far beyond the wildest dreams of a Stalin or Hitler. But philosophy teachers like the conceit of a philosopher-king and that’s why he hasn’t been consigned to the trash heap of history where he belongs.
Also worth reading, Donald Kagan's [1] "The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone" [2] that sets the context of this context.
TL;DR Stone's story is not very strong.
Hmm, was the rise of the Third Reich because a far-right and social democratic regime had liquidated the entirety of the militant left wing in Germany? Was it because of the vulnerabilities of parliamentary democracies that Carl Schmitt identified and helped the nascent Nazi movement exploit? Was it because the much lauded dialectical progression towards societies of greater freedom, touted by the German idealists, instead led to a country ravaged by war, leaving disillusionment and a moral void that a strongman with some convenient scapegoats could exploit?
No! Of course it was because Plato's authoritarian Republic ideas because they, with the most surface level interpretation, share the concept of class collaboration with fascism.
Popper has many good ideas but I think this was not one of them. The rise of fascism was incredibly historically contingent. It was a black swan event, and one of the defining characteristics of such events is that people always write flimsy narratives to explain them with the benefit of hindsight.
This is a very bold claim, and many (including myself) argue that authoritarianism and many things identified fascist are the inevitable result of liberal democracy. Capitalism cannibalizing itself, etc etc, which again many would argue is also inevitable. Marx outlines the inevitable decline of profit that drives this phenomenon in Volume III of Capital, but it is also a viewpoint shared by Adam Smith himself, John Stuart Mills, etc etc. Schumpeter also relies on it heavily in his analysis of the role of private property in driving market processes.
As profits inevitably decline, either capital will inevitably seize control of the state (dictatorship of capital) or the people do (dictatorship of the proletariat). Their interests are inherently at odds, and market forces ensures that this contradiction must be resolved. Inevitably.
Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.
The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.
It has never worked, and it never will.
I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.
At least Plato did the work in attempting to describe the qualities (of the soul) and structure necessary to erect a just society; the problem is that we have not cultivated the frame of mind to produce people with "philosopher king" traits. As we advance further in our technological development, we will need to think carefully about how we form societies that cultivate responsible stewards of technology. After all, not everyone is equal in their capacity to manage certain technologies responsibly. Plato made a serious attempt at addressing this problem. If we have failed in realizing his vision, it is because we forgot how to attend to our soul.
The Open Society and Its Enemies is an important and interesting anti-authoritarian book. Unfortunately, from a purely Plato-scholarship/interpretation perspective, it's trash.
Just read the Republic and see for yourself. Kallipolis is, first and foremost, simply meant to be a metaphor for the organization of an individual's soul. Second, the suggestion that the city should be led by a caste of authoritarian Philosopher Kings is given inside of a conditional---the condition being: those leaders must be True Philosophers; where True Philosophers know the Good and thus know (in a nearly omniscient-like way) what is best for everyone (and act accordingly). It is left wide open whether such True Philosophers even exist, thus it is left wide open whether such a social organization would ever work in reality.
Plato's other political dialogues, like Statesman and The Laws, are much much less utopian and "authoritarian" and deal with very practical political issues. It would be weird to be an authoritarian utopist and then go and write dialogues like those.
Comment approved by my wife, who is a Plato scholar. Your point that whether True Philosophers even exist is left open is the kind of problem she points out all the time in dogmatic interpretations. It sounds basic, but it's so important to keep in mind that just because a character says something (even if that character is Socrates), that doesn't mean it's the "view" of the dialogue. And you have to be careful to pin down exactly what is being claimed, as you point out with the conditional. Plato is a master (surely one of the greatest of all time) of creating a dynamic space to think in without settling the questions raised.
Saying Plato is "just asking questions" seems like a cop-out, he's responsible for what he implies, whatever character he makes say it. How about the allegory of the cave? The roots of fallibilism could be traced to that allegory - except for the part about philosophers, who are the ones who have escaped the cave and have seen the sun, implying that they gain access to the absolute truth.
Is every author who wishes to convey certain messages to their audience through narrative also responsible for every single thing his characters say? Character-driven narrative would seem to be at odds with such a view.
I was wondering about that too. But what I mean by "responsibility" is that the ideas presented have a definite form and don't get to evade criticism by being mercurial and shape-shifting. Not sure about art, like fiction. I'm not seeking to prevent authors from being ambiguously provocative, but it's a crappy way to reason.
In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance, formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be honest.
Not sure how that's possible. Laws may have a lot of strict marriage laws, but in Republic there is no marriage, the state assigns you sex partners in a rigged lottery, and requires the participants to be wearing masks so they can't form anything like an emotional bond. Really.
I'm a big fan of Karl Popper's work. I learned about him when reading the book Empirical Linguistics by Geoffrey Sampson. At the time, it was a pretty iconoclastic publication, since it directly struck against the assumption of nativism by framing the study of language as something that could be evidence-based in a way where hypotheses were truly falsifiable. The ability to collect and process large amounts of data pertinent to language make it a lot easier to strike down some of the more inscrutable theories of the '90s and '00s -- at least to those who are willing to do real science.
I don't think data collection was linguistics' greatest problem. Getting a lot of data from random places isn't going to help.
Having more data and being able to consistency process it actually can say a lot about the hypotheses that linguists have. All other science is evidence-based. The challenge for linguistics has been that many theorists pick and choose armchair examples rather than back their assertions up with statistical validity.
Whether or not the Republic ever reflected Plato's ideas about government, James Romm's recent book "Plato and the Tyrant" makes a compelling case that Plato changed his mind after trying to teach virtue and create a Philosopher King in Syracuse. His last book instead advocated for the rule of law (and was appropriately titled "The Laws")
> the principle of fallibilism: Truths are only true if they are verified through the give and take of experience and experiment.
I think Popper would object to the phrase "truths are only true if they are verified". We don't knowingly verify truths. The things we think are truths aren't even true, they're just not false (yet).
Given the argument tactics employed by Socrates in Plato's Dialogues, which include most of the standard catalog of fallacies, the question that arises in the mind of many readers is "why didn't they kill him sooner?"
An antidote to this antiquated and distorted view of Plato can be found in the following book: In Defense of Plato by Ronald B. Levinson.
I was first exposed to Popper in my first year in university, in an introductory course to epistemology, and I liked him right away. I've carried Refutability and the Paradox of Tolerance with me ever since.
By the way David Deutsch could be reasonably said to be Popper's biggest fan. If you're interested in Deutsch and Popper you could do worse than picking up "The Beginning of Infinity" to get acquainted with both, it's a great book.
What if a society's collapse is a feature of progress, not a failure of it? Popper argues that open societies thrive on questioning and closed ones stagnate by suppressing it. But this introduces the contradiction that openness can't be preserved by any fixed set of rules as rules rigid enough to structure a society inevitably devolves the openness they're meant to protect.
The optimistic read of that problem is that the devolution is itself the corrective. Athens outpaces Sparta through openness, devolves, falls. Rome's republic succeeds it, devolves, falls. Promoting growth is then: promote openness as a principle and accept that when a society devolves, its failure clears the way for selection for increased openness.
It seems to me that the open society is in a perpetual state of trying to outrun an endless sequence of problems: would-be invaders from closed societies, internal activists who would rather close down the society in the name of stability, exhaustion of resources on the planet, solar system, and so on, the inevitable asteroid impact or supernova, etc.
And the idea is that this endless sequence of problems exists regardless of how open your society is. So even if you were able to implement a perfect set of authoritarian rules to establish a stable closed society with the technology to capture all the resources from the solar system and redirect all dangerous asteroids, well crap, you still weren't innovative enough to stop the supernova from killing everyone 200 million years later.
Seems right to me
Worth noting that Popper himself would probably reject this as he explicitly argues history has no meaning or direction. I'm inclined to see this view as in tension with the idea that openness promotes growth combined with the idea that growth is self-selecting
Sounds like nihilism.
The output of /dev/random doesn't have meaning, but that doesn't make my kernel a nihilist.
Why can't the society have evolving rules? Looks like your "rules rigid enough to structure a society" phrase denies this is possible, for no reason.
I was likely being too definitive there. I think there is a strong tension between rules rigid enough to structure a society and maintaining a principle of openness. I think optimistically allowing for failures of various kinds (one could imagine it at a lower level than the entire society) allows for a more robust pursuit of openness.
Also worth reading, I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates” that sets the context. TL:DR Socrates was deeply involved with a group of Quisling aristocrats who briefly overthrew democracy with Sparta’s help. Athens’ withdrawal agreement with Sparta stipulated amnesty for the collaborators, so they used the roundabout prosecution. They were not going to execute him, just strip him of his civic rights, but his arrogant conduct during the trial so incensed the jurors that more voted for the death penalty than had voted to convict him.
Otherwise, it’s important to remember Plato sock-puppets Socrates, who had no truck with the newfangled and subversive invention of writing and thus could not correct the record. What is clear is that Plato, a disgruntled aristocrat himself, exiled for being part of the quisling faction, was a proto-fascist far beyond the wildest dreams of a Stalin or Hitler. But philosophy teachers like the conceit of a philosopher-king and that’s why he hasn’t been consigned to the trash heap of history where he belongs.
Also worth reading, Donald Kagan's [1] "The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone" [2] that sets the context of this context. TL;DR Stone's story is not very strong.
[1] eminent historian of ancient Greece, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan
[2] https://www.commentary.org/articles/donald-kagan/the-trial-o...
Hmm, was the rise of the Third Reich because a far-right and social democratic regime had liquidated the entirety of the militant left wing in Germany? Was it because of the vulnerabilities of parliamentary democracies that Carl Schmitt identified and helped the nascent Nazi movement exploit? Was it because the much lauded dialectical progression towards societies of greater freedom, touted by the German idealists, instead led to a country ravaged by war, leaving disillusionment and a moral void that a strongman with some convenient scapegoats could exploit?
No! Of course it was because Plato's authoritarian Republic ideas because they, with the most surface level interpretation, share the concept of class collaboration with fascism.
Popper has many good ideas but I think this was not one of them. The rise of fascism was incredibly historically contingent. It was a black swan event, and one of the defining characteristics of such events is that people always write flimsy narratives to explain them with the benefit of hindsight.
> The rise of fascism...was a black swan event
This is a very bold claim, and many (including myself) argue that authoritarianism and many things identified fascist are the inevitable result of liberal democracy. Capitalism cannibalizing itself, etc etc, which again many would argue is also inevitable. Marx outlines the inevitable decline of profit that drives this phenomenon in Volume III of Capital, but it is also a viewpoint shared by Adam Smith himself, John Stuart Mills, etc etc. Schumpeter also relies on it heavily in his analysis of the role of private property in driving market processes.
As profits inevitably decline, either capital will inevitably seize control of the state (dictatorship of capital) or the people do (dictatorship of the proletariat). Their interests are inherently at odds, and market forces ensures that this contradiction must be resolved. Inevitably.
Karl Popper's warnings are more relevant now than ever as we continuously trade one version of a top-down, engineered Kallipolis for another. Plato failed to institute his own utopian blueprint, and it should have died in Syracuse. Instead, we endured a thousand years of the Catholic Church's theological adaptation, and today we are accelerating toward a technocratic iteration – essentially operating on a secularized Catholic hangover.
The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.
It has never worked, and it never will.
I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.
At least Plato did the work in attempting to describe the qualities (of the soul) and structure necessary to erect a just society; the problem is that we have not cultivated the frame of mind to produce people with "philosopher king" traits. As we advance further in our technological development, we will need to think carefully about how we form societies that cultivate responsible stewards of technology. After all, not everyone is equal in their capacity to manage certain technologies responsibly. Plato made a serious attempt at addressing this problem. If we have failed in realizing his vision, it is because we forgot how to attend to our soul.
"The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie."
But it's not really that new, it goes to Leo Strauss at least. And the whole American imperialist project was built on it.
If you like Popper you'd like Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth