- Popper, Karl R.
The Open Society and Its
Enemies. Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx.
London: Routledge, [1945, 1962, 1966, 1995] 2003.
ISBN 0-415-27842-2.
-
After tracing the Platonic origins of utopian schemes of top-down
social engineering in
Volume 1
(December 2003), Popper now turns to the best-known
modern exemplars of the genre, Hegel and Marx, starting
out by showing Aristotle's contribution to Hegel's
philosophy. Popper considers Hegel a complete charlatan
and his work a blizzard of obfuscation intended to dull
the mind to such an extent that it can believe that the
Prussian monarchy (which paid the salaries of Hegel and
his acolytes) was the epitome of human freedom. For a
work of serious philosophical criticism (there are more
than a hundred pages of end notes in small type), Popper is
forthrightly acerbic and often quite funny in his treatment of Hegel,
who he disposes of in only 55 pages of this book of
470. (Popper's contemporary,
Wittgenstein, gets much the same treatment. See note 51 to chapter 11, for example, in
which he calls the Tractatus
“reinforced dogmatism that opens wide the door to the
enemy, deeply significant metaphysical nonsense…”.
One begins to comprehend what possessed Wittgenstein, a year
after the publication of this book, to
brandish a fireplace poker at Popper.)
Readers who think of Popper as an icon of libertarianism
may be surprised at his remarkably positive treatment of
Marx, of whom he writes (chapter 13), “Science progresses
through trial and error. Marx tried, and although
he erred in his main doctrines, he did not try in vain. He
opened and sharpened our eyes in many ways. A return to
pre-Marxian social science is inconceivable. All modern
writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it.
… One cannot do justice to Marx without
recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense
of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of
moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world's most
influential fighters against hypocisy and pharisaism. He had
a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious
of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in
words.”
To be sure, this encomium is the prelude to a detailed critique
of Marx's deterministic theory of history and dubious
economic notions, but unlike Hegel, Marx is given credit for
trying to make sense of phenomena which few others even
attempted to study scientifically. Many of the flaws in
Marx's work, Popper argues, may be attributed to Marx having
imbibed too deeply and uncritically the work of Hegel, and the
crimes committed in the name of Marxism the result of those
treating his work as received dogma, as opposed to a theory
subject to refutation, as Marx himself would have viewed it.
Also surprising is his condemnation, with almost Marxist vehemence, of
nineteenth century “unrestrained capitalism”, and enthusiasm for
government intervention in the economy and the emergence
of the modern welfare state (chapter 20 in particular). One must
observe, with the advantage of sixty years hindsight, that F.A.
Hayek's less sanguine contemporary perspective in
The Road to Serfdom
(May 2002) has proved more prophetic. Of particular
interest is Popper's advocacy of “piecemeal social
engineering”, as opposed to grand top-down systems such
as “scientific socialism”, as the genuinely scientific method
of improving society, permitting incremental progress by
experiments on the margin which are subject to falsification
by their results, in the same manner Popper argues the
physical sciences function in
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Permit me to make a few remarks about the physical properties
of this book. The paperback seems to have a spine made of
triple-reinforced neutronium, and cannot be induced to lie flat
by any of the usual stratagems. In fact, when reading the book,
one must either use two hands to hold it open or else wedge it open
with three fingers against the spine in order to read complete
lines of text. This is tiring, particularly since the book is
also quite heavy. If you happen to doze off whilst reading
(which I'll confess happened a few times during some of the more
intricate philosophical arguments), the thing will pop out of
your hand, snap shut like a bear trap, and fly off in some random
direction—Zzzzzz … CLACK … thud!
I don't know what the problem is with the binding—I have any
number of O'Reilly paperbacks
about the same size and shape which lie flat without the need
for any extreme measures.
The text is set in a type font in which the distinction between
roman and italic type is very subtle—sometimes I had to take off
my glasses (I am nearsighted) and eyeball the text close-up
to see if a word was actually emphasised, and that runs the risk
of a bloody nose if your thumb should slip and the thing snap
shut.
A U.S. edition of this volume is now back
in print; for a while only
Volume 1 was available from
Princeton University Press. The
U.K. edition of Volume 1
from Routledge remains available.
November 2005 