POPPER’S OPEN SOCIETY AFTER FIFTY YEARS POPPER’S OPEN SOCIETY AFTER FIFTY YEARS The continuing relevance of Karl Popper Edited by Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1999 selection and editorial matter, Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong; individual contributions, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Popper’s Open Society after fifty years: the continuing relevance of Karl Popper/edited by Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong. p. cm. Includes bibliographcal references and index. Revised papers presented at a conference held in 1995 at the Central European University, Prague in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. 1. Popper, Karl Raimund, Sir, 1902–94 Open society and its enemies-Congresses. 2. Philosophy-Congresses. 3. Social sciences-Philosophy-Congresses. I.Jarvie, I.C. (Ian Charles). II. Pralong, Sandra. B63.P6 1999 98–47993 301–dc21 CIP ISBN 0-203-98287-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-16502-4 (Print Edition) TO ERNEST GELLNER (1925–1995) CONTENTS List of contributors vii Acknowledgments v iii PART I Preliminaries 1 Introduction 2 IAN JARVIESANDRA PRALONG 1 Personal recollections of the publication of The Open 16 Society E.H.GOMBRICH 2 The future is open: a conversation with Sir Karl Popper 27 ADAM J.CHMIELEWSKIKARL R.POPPER PART II Addressing the text 41 3 The Open Society and Its Enemies: authority, community, 42 and bureaucracy MARK A.NOTTURNO 4 Popper and Tarski 57 DAVID MILLER 5 Popper’s ideal types: open and closed, abstract and 72 concrete societies IAN JARVIE 6 The sociological deficit of The Open Society, analyzed and 84 remedied JOHN A.HALL 7 A whiff of Hegel in The Open Society? 98 JOHN WATKINS PART III Applying the text 1 09 8 The problem of objectivity in law and ethics 1 10 vi CHRISTOPH VON METTENHEIM 9 Minima Moralia: is there an ethics of the open society? 1 27 SANDRA PRALONG 10 What use is Popper to a practical politician? 1 44 BRYAN MAGEE 11 The Polish Church as an enemy of the open society: some 1 57 reflections on post-communist social-political transformations in Central Europe ANDRZEJ FLIS 12 Life after liberalism 1 68 ADAM J.CHMIELEWSKI 13 The notion of the modern nation-state: Popper and 1 80 nationalism JOSEPH AGASSI 14 Is there causality in history? 1 95 CYRIL HÖSCHL 15 Matching Popperian theory to practice 2 01 FRED EIDLIN Subject index 2 05 Name index 2 14 CONTRIBUTORS Joseph Agassi is a former Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and York University, Toronto, Canada. Adam J.Chmielewski is Professor of Philosophy, University of Wrodaw, Poland. Fred Eidlin is Professor of Political Science, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Andrzej Flis is Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. Sir Ernst H.Gombrich is the former Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, University of London, UK. John A.Hall is Professor of Sociology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Cyril Höschl is Professor of Psychiatry, Director of the Prague Psychiatric Centre, and Dean of the Third School of Medicine at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Ian Jarvie is Professor of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Canada. Bryan Magee is a former British MP and Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University, UK. Christoph von Mettenheim is an Attorney with the Rechtsanwalt beim Bundesgerichtshof in Karlsruhe, Germany. David Miller is a Reader in Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. Mark A.Notturno is the Director of the Popper Project at the CEU Foundation, Vienna, Austria. Sandra Pralong is a Doctoral candidate in Political Science, Columbia University, New York, and the former Director of the Open Society Foundation, Bucharest, Romania. John Watkins is a former Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics, London, UK. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It takes many hands, heads, and hearts to put togeter a volume, and it is always difficult to give each a fair share. However, there are some people without whom this book would not have existed, and whom we take this opportunity to thank: Gaye Woolven, Ernest Gellner’s personal assistant, who helped organize the 1995 Prague Conference and energetically started the process of publishing a volume in its wake; John Hall, who succeeded Ernest Gellner as the head of the Center for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University in Prague, and who kindly secured a small grant to get the project underway; Susan Gellner, Ernest Gellner’s wife, who graciously offered the use of Gellner’s correspondence; and Raymond and Melitta Mew, Karl Popper’s close collaborators and now the executors of the Popper estate, who generously offered the use of archival material, correspondence, and other documents. Also, our thanks go to Richard Stoneman, senior editor at Routledge, for his unfailing support and interest in the project, to Coco Stevenson, his senior assistant, and to Sarah Hall, in charge of production. Ian Jarvie, Toronto, 1999 Sandra Pralong, New York, 1999 Part I PRELIMINARIES INTRODUCTION Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong Fifty years ago, Routledge & Kegan Paul took a chance on a bulky manuscript by an unknown thinker, that, it turned out, made a decisive contribution to liberal thought. That book was The Open Society and Its Enemies. Karl Popper, who wrote it while he was teaching in New Zealand, called the book his “war effort.” As he observed from afar the threat that fascism posed to freedom and rationalism, he sought to encourage reflection about those aspirations and institutions which can help prevent societies from falling prey to totalitarian ideologies. Perhaps due to the distance separating him from the theater of events, Popper was among the first political philosophers to put totalitarianism in perspective and to conceive of a framework for the study of society that could identify the parallels between all forms of closed society—tribalist, fascist, communist, religious-fundamentalist, etc. In a way, the book seems a response to Kant’s call in “What is Enlightenment?”, “Sapere Aude!”—Dare to know! For Kant, “The Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutellage… of incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance” (Popper 1992:128). Knowledge, thinking for oneself, questioning authority, criticism and self-criticism are, for Popper as for Kant, the tools of one’s freedom. The preface to The Open Society’s first edition makes this idea clear: “we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men make great mistakes…” Popper writes, referring to Plato, Hegel, and Marx. Three views of history: pessimistic, optimistic, indeterministic The Open Society and Its Enemies was published in London in late 1945, in two volumes. The first, entitled “The Spell of Plato,” was a sustained attempt to trace the history and doctrines of historicism to their Ancient Greek origins, especially Plato. “Historicism” was the name Popper coined for the view that there are inevitable laws of historical development.1 Plato was a pessimist: the laws of development govern a tendency to deterioration. The best we can do is to slow