SOME ASPECTS OF POPPER'S CRITIQUE OF PLATONIC POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

© 1994 by Harold P. Sjursen

All Rights Reserved

[English version of Algunos Aspectos de la Crítica de Popper a La Filosofía Política Platónica, in El Poder De Los Argumentos. Coloquio Internacional Karl Popper , ed., Enrique Suárez-Iñiguez, Mexico City, 1997.]

Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies and his smaller volume The Poverty of Historicism , together proclaim the warning to liberal communities one and all: Beware of Grand Philosophical Attempts to produce the Good Society --such attempts lack scientific basis and make the danger of totalitarism ever the more likely.   The philosophical failure lies in what Popper calls "historicism," any holistic philosophy that depends upon a doctrine of an inexorible historical power for which, he argues, there is no scientific justification.   The totalitarianism he warns of are the totalizing political systems of the mid-twentieth century, most especially Communism and Fascism.   Thus Popper is suggesting that historicist philosophy has a pernicious influence on political life.   Since the political life that Popper prefers emerges from the free exchange of ideas in an open society, his critique must imply, to some extent at least, that historicist philosophy fetters the free exchange of ideas and undermines fundamental liberties.   Such philosophy, of course, must rise to leviathan proportions as controlling idealogy before totalitarianism can take hold.   But this is, Popper claims, what has happened in liberal societies misguided by the allures of historicism. These are serious charges concerning crucial issues. But the charges have puzzled some commentators who find the concept of historicism as it is putatively present in philosophy insufficiently precise.   Some critics have suggested that the historicist Popper portrays is nowhere to be found in the history of philosophy, that neither Plato nor Marx is in Popper's sense really historicist.  

I wish to consider some aspects of this question, along with others, in relation to Popper's reading of Plato, especially Plato's Republic .   If one charges that this is too limited an application of Popper's thesis to be fair, my defense is only that I am not herewith attempting a critique of his general method and viewpoint, but rather putting forward several obvious questions prompted by a reading of the Republic .   Other critics have taken issue with Popper's analysis of the origins   of 20th century totalitarianism, suggesting that he grants a misplaced emphasis on the influence of intellectual discourse and looses sight of history itself.   This latter question is perhaps the question of historicism: Does the logical development of idea have any bearing on the course of history?   A strong affirmative answer to this question constitutes historicism, and it is historicism in this sense that Popper finds in Plato. Of course Popper makes clear that in his view Plato tries to have it both ways, slipping in and out of historicism in a misguided effort to control fate.

I must declare at the outset that although in many ways I would count myself among Popper's critics I do not find his views, as many apparently did, the reactionary sentiments of a cold warrior. On the contrary he has been one of our centuries most important voices on behalf of pluralism and the free exchange of ideas.   All those who have followed Popper's career know of his brief, youthful identification with Communism, an interest which lasted only until he became aware of its impersonal brutality. But it was exactly that, the impersonal brutality of an ideological politics that he abhorred and dedicated himself against.    And I would agree that much of Popper's work has been inaptly characterized out of motivations more polemical than philosophical. Popper's famous remark, "Criticism of my alleged views was widespread and highly successful, I have yet to meet a criticism of my views." is not without some self indulgence, but still reflects a widespread intellectual hostility which generally missed the mark. Nonetheless, in my remarks, I shall risk suggesting that Popper's reading of Plato invokes a significant misunderstanding.

Popper's misunderstanding of Plato's Republic , if indeed it is a misunderstanding, derives from a failure on Popper's part to recognize the kind of text Plato has bequeathed us.   It is generally understood that The Open Society is a more or less polemical work in which Popper   means to propose a corrective to prevalent tendencies in the orthodox readings of Plato, Hegel and Marx. The Open Society is Popper's "warwork."   What is perhaps less recognized is that the Republic of Plato is likewise a warwork, i.e., a work written in response to a perceived political crisis.   Both Plato's and Popper's works are thus correctives which mean to foster an adjustment to accepted political normativities.   One might argue, thereby, that both books present excesses -- to shift the balance, as it were, -- although in opposite directions.   This would suggest that there was a moderate position between the two opposing poles of excess.   The problem here is that the two opposing poles, Plato and Popper, are asymmetrically related to each other.   Plato's problem is today what would be called a legitimation crisis -- the political question of what bestows legitimacy to rule.   Popper's issue, on the other hand, emerges from a strong moral reaction against the brutalizing measures of Communism and Fascism.

Popper asserts that Plato's Republic , which is ordinarily said to be devoted to the question of justice, is neither about a republic in the modern sense nor does it consider a concept of justice even minimally acceptable by humanitarian standards.   According to Popper Plato's Republic is a work of great artifice on behalf of injustice and totalitarianism.   Popper is most critical of the justice found in the Republic because it does not rest on an egalitarian foundation.   He suggests that egalitarian views of justice were well known to Plato; that he basically ignored them.   They had been already articulated and even defended in the earlier Socratic dialogue the Gorgias (I shall return later to Popper's distinction between Socratic and Platonic political outlooks) and perhaps more importantly were the substance of Pericles' positions.   Popper quotes Pericles in order to characterize the view of justice that he thinks Plato despises: " [we] afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence.   When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward for merit; and poverty is not a bar ..."[95]   Popper's central objection to a non-egalitarian conception of justice is clearly that it discriminates against individuals trapped in a class or caste as the consequence of their heritage.   Moreover, he repeatedly takes Plato to task for suggesting that justice consists in doing what is one's own.   In other words, one of Popper's most strident objections to Plato's view of justice as developed in the Republic could be addressed if one could only show that the formation of the classes in the Republic was not oppressive or based on economic status and did not violate the kind of equal opportunity that Pericles lauds. More generally, if one could show, that the class structure described in the Republic is neither capricious nor unfair and distributes justice according to merit, Popper's primary criticism would be thereby dissipated.   Popper himself suggests the standard for doing this in his enumeration of the elements of justice in The Open Society and Its Enemies . There he says that a humanitarian conception of justice must mean something like this: "(a) An equal distribution of the burden of citizenship, i.e., those limitations of freedom which are necessary in social life;   (b) equal treatment of the citizens before the law, provided, of course, that (c) the laws show neither favour nor disfavour towards individual citizens or groups or classes; (d) impartiality of the courts of justice; and (e) an equal share in the advantages (and not only in the burden) which membership in the state may offer to its citizens."[89]   I think that if one considers how and to what end the good city is founded it should be clear that Plato offers no justification of the sort of repression and discrimination that Popper quite properly deplores.

Before turning to the founding of the good city a further point needs to be clarified.   Popper points out that ancient versions of egalitarianism had sometimes been weakly defended on naturalistic grounds, viz., the assertion of the biological equality of all men (an attitude neither Popper nor Plato endorse) a view which would then yield an equality of natural rights following from equal natural capacities.   But Popper is instead interested in Plato's use of naturalistic arguments against egalitarianism.   He analyzes such naturalistic thinking, distinguishing three components which he says Plato combines and assimilates into his own view.   The three components that Popper names and identifies as intermediary positions between naive monism and critical dualism, are: (1) biological naturalism, (2) ethical or juridical positivism and (3) psychological or spiritual naturalism. All are erroneous, Popper argues, because they illegitimately connect natural laws and normative laws, which is contrary to the correct understanding expressed by critical dualism.

It is interesting to note that the naturalist view of justice presented in the Republic is in fact the view Thrasymachos proclaims and which Glaucon in recalling the Myth of Gyges shows in its most dangerous aspect. The point of Glaucon's recounting of this myth is to show that if civic justice were only an arbitrary convention among men and if natural law defended the actions of the stronger against the weaker, then if one only were invisible to civil law there would be no incentive to any other form of justice.   Justice would be just as Thrasymachos proclaimed, the interest of the stronger.   What Socrates undertakes to do is exactly a refutation of natural justice in this sense. But Glaucon's demand is further problematized in the dialogue by Adeimantos's parallel request.

Glaucon's interpretation of the Thrasymachean account of justice is supplemented by Adeimantos who sees the issue more explicitly in terms of opinion, which is of course formed by rhetoric (the art of Thrasymachos.) What most troubles Adeimantos is that justice is generally not praised for its own sake, but for its rewards. If justice itself is not good or pleasant,   as Adeimantos allows the poetic tradition as well as the laws teach, then what incentive is there for one to strive for justice?

Between them Socrates is challenged to refute a more complex notion of justice than one merely grounded in biological naturalism.   Jointly the problem that Glaucon and Adeimantos present to Socrates is that of individual justice under the conditions whereby justice itself does not seem to be desirable.   In the face of the possibly operative natural and civil conditions of justice, what motivation is there for an individual to act in a way consistent with true justice rather than just striving to appear to be just.   Contrary to the sentiment made in the Pericles citation offered by Popper to offer public reward to those individuals of merit, the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantos suggests a skepticism regarding the manipulative power of public authority to reward the unjust.   Obviously the question brought to Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantos concerning justice is shaped by the fear of a corrupt public order.

The salient point is that the proposal for justice that Plato has Socrates put forward is advanced in a moment of at least perceived political crisis.   This perception is based in the apprehension that the appearance of justice, which can be easily created and modified, will displace true justice.   The question, in my view eminently practical, is what are the incentives to justice if the mere appearance of justice will determine public reward and punishment?

This is in a sense exactly the problem Plato saw in Socrates' own life.   For Socrates was a good man, striving for justice, who was not given a fair hearing in the public space. In the Republic when Socrates reluctantly agrees to take up Glaucon and Adeimantos's demand to define individual justice he converts it into the question of public justice or the justice of the polis. This is precisely the issue left but not resolved from the Apology and Crito . It is instructive to pay particular attention to several of Socrates' remarks in those dialogues.   In his defense ( Apology ) against the charges of corrupting the youth and not respecting the traditional beliefs Socrates, the practitioner of doxic exchange par excellence proclaims: "Do not be angry at me for telling the truth: no man will be spared if he genuinely opposes you or any other great number and prevents many unjust and illegal things from happening in the city."   Earlier in the dialogue, at the point where Socrates had forced Meletos to make the absurd claim that virtually all Athenians knew how to improve the young and only Socrates corrupted them, Socrates replies: "Does that hold true of horses too, in your opinion?   Do all men make them better, with the exception of one, who ruins them?   Or it is just the reverse: only one can make them better, or very few, namely the horse-trainer, whereas the many, if they own and use horses, ruin them?   Isn't that the way it is, Meletos, both for horses and all other animals?   In the dialogue bearing his name Crito has come to visit Socrates in prison because public opinion has shifted since the trial and Socrates' escape would be welcomed more than his execution.   Dismissing his friend's suggestion that the appearance of a gross injustice constitutes grounds for an escape, Socrates says to Crito: "Ought we to be guided and intimidated by the opinion of the many or by that of the one -- assuming that there is someone with expert knowledge?   It is true that we ought to respect and fear this person more than all the rest put together, and that if we do not follow his guidance we shall spoil and mutilate that part of us which, as we use to say, is improved by right conduct and destroyed by wrong?   Or is all this nonsense?"

The Socratic enigma or paradox derives from the dilemma of holding to both a standard of truth which may dismiss public opinion and a belief in the salutary value of a pluralistic discourse characterized by genuine doxic exchange.

(I wish to capture an important feature of the Socratic dialogue with the expression " doxic exchange ."   Throughout Plato's writings the Greek term doxa is used to mean both "reputation" and "opinion."   The Socratic conversation is more than just a seminar in which participants share and debate ideas; rather the putting forth of doxa is fundamentally positioning oneself vis-a-vis others.   It is the establishment of one's political topos .)

As everyone knows Plato counted the execution of Socrates among the greatest of tragedies because a just individual whose sense of civic responsibility was unsurpassed was not seen in the public domain to be just.   After Socrates, if individual justice cannot be seen, and if it lacks its own intrinsic rewards, why should anyone be just?   This is the aporia of justice according to Plato.   One can question whether Popper's account of humanistic justice adequately addresses it.   One might say that the key issue of the Republic is not "What is justice?" but "How can justice be seen?" -- surely an abiding political problem.   But these brief observations help to explain the otherwise unwarranted switch on Socrates' part (in the 2nd Book of the Republic ) from the search for individual justice to the task of founding a perfectly just city.   We have a right to expect, lest individual justice be forgotten altogether, that in the just polis justice will be seen.

Socrates' explanation of why he will look first to the polis to see justice, rather than within the individual, strikes many as odd and unsubstantial.   Socrates says that one can see justice in the city initially because it is writ larger and this will allow one more easily to see the justice in the soul.   He compares the process that he is going to use to seeing two lines of written letters at a distance, the same except for their size.   One can actually see what the smaller letters are if one sees the larger ones first.   Socrates proposes to first write justice large in the city permitting us later to see the justice in the individual.

The question of the relation between the individual and the public thing in Plato is quite different from modern conceptions of the individual and the state.   To understand Socrates's shift from the question of individual justice to the justice of the polis the Platonic notion of this relationship must be examined briefly.   As is often done I shall refer to this relationship as the soul-city parallelism. But first a few comments on how the city is built.

The founding of the good city proceeds in three stages.   In the first we see an approximation of the sort of biological naturalistic justice Popper mentions (and regards as most unjust).   It is important to remember that at this stage the city is the manifestation of natural, i.e., bodily desires.   But these desires or appetites include the dispositions toward the various arts.   One is inclined to be a carpenter as an expression of bodily nature.   The inclination is linked by nature to skill.   These economic characteristics of the person reflect just what that person is according to biological nature.   However implausible one may find this notion, it is the working presupposition of the good city. No one performs at an art for which one is not perfectly suited by virtue of both skill and inclination.   It is also stipulated, as a feature of the first stage of the good city, that --again according to nature-- that the distribution of the arts is ideal, i.e., the production of goods and services meet the needs of everyone in such a way that there is no surplus wealth and no poverty.

By way of these stipulations Socrates portrays nature as working without destructive conflict.   To be sure this is not a community of equals; each individual is markedly different in performative abilities from most others. Yet there is perfect equity because the inequalities function organically together.   This is proportionate but not arithmetic equity.   The "superior" do not reign over the "inferior" because the principle of exchange permits all work to be valuable.   Since no one is deprived, the grossly unfair behaviors characteristic of natural appetitive drives are ameliorated.   So at this stage of the founding of the good city, if the organic harmony of nature is not disturbed, economic justice is achieved.

Now while many people, Popper and myself included, would argue that this description of any actual community is highly counterfactual, we must remember that Plato is describing a city in speech.   Yet still we must ask what is unjust about this city?   From the standpoint of Popper's humanitarian justice its most glaring fault lies in its lack of individualism.   Without doubt the autonomous individual of liberal political theory is not here to be found.   The individual citizens do contribute to the well being of the city by doing that which they do well and which gives them pleasure. Their activity is thus self rewarding and cannot be replaced by a false appearance. We have also seen something of Plato's reserve, based on Socrates' experience, to favor the few over the many.   His simple reasoning is that most people cannot do all things equally well. The first stage of the good city finds everyone doing that for which they are best suited and this in turn benefiting all.   But does this sort of technocratic control of individual actions have any place public life?   As autonomous individuals don't we have the freedom, as in Kant's famous example, to let our talents rust?   At this point we turn to the soul-city parallelism in order to compare it with Popper's individual-state model.

The lack of individual autonomy is not repaired with the addition of the next two stages to the good city.   In fact since it is in these two stages that regulatory authority is introduced, one would expect the parameters of individual choice and action to be further diminished.   Yet we have seen that individual freedom of choice and action is not a good in itself, at least not the good sought in the Republic ; rather the concern is for individual justice.

Since the concern brought to Socrates in the Republic by Glaucon and Adeimantos was individual justice, Socrates' strategic shift to the design of the good city may suggest evidence to some that Plato is indeed not concerned with the good of the individual after all.   Popper is convinced that Plato conflates the notions of egoism and individualism on the one hand and altruism and collectivism on the other.   He says that while the term "individualism"   may connote a selfishness which abjures the good of others, this is not the only meaning of "individualism" and indeed need not be the case.   Popper asserts that altruistic individualism is a genuine possibility and he even makes the claim that "this individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of our western civilization." [102]   However a consideration of the soul-city parallelism may offer a different interpretation.   We have already briefly described Plato's view of the individual's biological nature.   It is based on desire or appetite understood in a broad enough sense   sufficient to account for the various arts. If nature were like an organism then the distribution of appetites and desires would quite simply and naturally result in the kind of harmony portrayed in the first stage of the good city.   But the situation is more complex as the desires themselves require restraint.   Plato's psychology attempts to explain how the desires are regulated.   In the Republic the individual is said to have a tri-partite soul with the lowest part consisting of the desires or appetites.   Call this the appetitive soul.   It is restrained by those feelings that we know from experience can overwhelm desire; a feeling of honor, e.g., may restrain various base desires.   Call this the spirited soul.   Yet for this to work well, and sometimes Plato thought it did work well, reason needed to be invoked and so the third part of the tri-partite sould is the rational. In the just individual, reason will rule.   Now the Socrates of the Republic , as well as the Socrates in the Apology and Crito , postulates that most people are driven or dominated by their appetites.   In the Republic the "Allegory of the Cave" shows desires to enslave the prisoners to their own beliefs. The problem, and here I would say that Marx and Plato have something in common although it is also what sets them most emphatically apart, is that the many do not possess the inclination to leave the cave.   If this is so, then how can justice be done?   Plato's suggestion is for the city to imitate the human soul, to have a tri-partite structure.   The artisans who are the many correspond in the city to the appetitive soul.   Plato calls them money-makers because it is the invention of money that permits the free exchange of goods and services and permits each individual to practice the art for which he/she is best suited.   Another class must restrain the artisans according to the principles of civic virtue. These are the watchdogs.   The highest class must of course be the reason of the city personified in the philosopher.   The city is guided by reason, not by class interest and not by the power to reward and punish.   One should keep track of distribution of political power, which derives from the authority of reason, and that of personal liberty which is the expression of the desires.   In Plato's good city they are inversely related.   As political power increases personal liberties are reduced.   The ruler of the good city of the Republic is so completely dominated by reason that the exercise of the desires has practically vanished.   Among the artisans desires dominate in such a way that they require regulation by external reason, but unless the desires are satisfied the artisans will refuse to follow reason's rule. That is to say, the rule of reason is such that the artisans benefit and they must at least have a sense of this.

The obvious problem with this parallelism, the one so obvious that Popper can't see how politically it can be overlooked, is that the two upper classes of the city are actually administrative entities staffed by individuals who, given the kind of power and authority they are granted in the Republic , will use that position to satisfy their own desires. There is no   such thing as a true philosopher-king.   In a sense the rulers will revert to the sort of naturalistic justice described by Thrasymachos. It is this objection which leads Popper to understand the Republic as totalitarian. Popper is exact in this charge.   "The identification of the fate of the state with that of the ruling class; the exclusive interest in this class, and in its unity; and subservient to this unity, the rigid rules for breeding and educating this class, and the strict supervision and collectivization of the interests of its members." [86]

I am not entirely sure whether Popper means to say that it is the injustice of the Republic that makes it totalitarian, or perhaps that the Republic is both unjust and totalitarian.   I have tried to show that the Platonic conception of justice, concerned primarily as it is with individual justice, is not pernicious and unjust as Popper suggests.   But a new problem develops when individual justice is specifically related to the political.   The problem was certainly suggested by Socrates, but it was left to Plato to   develop it systematically.   Political philosophy had its beginning at this point. As Hannah Arendt put it, "Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.   I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.   The beginning was made when, in the Republic 's "Allegory of the Cave", Plato describes the sphere of human affairs -- all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world -- in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas.   The end came with Marx's declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the affairs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be "realized" only in the sphere of living together, which he called "society," through the emergence of "socialized men."   Political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics; its tradition began with the philosopher's turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs.   The end came when a philosopher turned away from philosophy so as to "realize" it in politics.   This was Marx's attempt, expressed first in his decision (in itself philosophical) to abjure philosophy, and second in his intention to "change the world" and thereby the philosophizing minds, the "consciousness" of men." [ Tradition and the Modern Age ]

Karl Popper does not share Arendt's views concerning the beginning and end of political philosophy, nor her separation between tradition and the modern age.   Indeed Marx's goal of the realization of philosophy in politics to change the world and produce socialized men might do as a description of historicism.   It is the Platonic adherence to a type of historicism which, in part, according to Popper, accounts for its totalitarian impulse.   The basic mistake of historicism, Popper explains, is a rather virulent commission of the naturalistic fallacy.   Popper holds to a very strict separation between facts and values, natural laws and normative laws, physis and nomos .   In the case of Plato what Popper tries to show is that the philosopher's interest in nature is disastrously applied to the realm of normative society where it simply has no validity.   In attempting this, Popper charges, Plato simultaneously embraces a position radically at odds with his own theory of nature as expressed in the Theory of Ideas.   Together with historicism in Plato Popper says there is "a diametrically opposite approach ... which may be called the attitude of social engineering ." [22]   The charge of social engineering makes sense in the case of Marx's goal to change the world.   But I do not see that Plato's philosopher wishes to change the world or engage in social engineering of any sort.   Marx expressed the same view toward Plato in his disdainful Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

If Marx stood Plato on his head there is some sense in which Plato can be blamed; Plato, after all, was there to be inverted.   But this is to say no more than that the failures of the tradition gave birth to the modern age.   To that extent Plato and the entire tradition of political philosophy share a culpability for the horrors of totalitarianism.   But to argue, as Popper does, that Plato's exploration of the idea of justice was the bacterium that produced the sickness of totalitarianism is a misreading of Plato.   Rather than being an enemy of the open society, Plato is no social scientist or engineer at all.   The polis is not the same thing as society.   When Aquinas said, "man is by nature political, that is, social" [Summa], Plato's (and Aristotle's) idea of the political is lost.   For Plato and the Greeks generally to reduce the two to each other would be to reduce human life to what it had in common with other animals.   Participation in the political, that which is uniquely the province of humankind, sets the stage for Plato's discussion of justice in the Republic .

The Republic addresses the question of the principle of rule --rational justice-- and not the specific measures of social organization.   These measures, the ones described in the Republic , are --like the images in the cave-- twice removed from the legitimate principle of rule.   Nonetheless they allow us to see that principle. However, as in Socrates' simile to explain his strategic shift from the examination of the individual soul to the describing of a city, the shape of the small letters does not follow from the shape of the larger, i.e., cannot be inferred from it, so too the social institutions of the good city neither follow logically from nor imply the principle of legitimate rule.   The Platonic claim is only, true to the task give Socrates by Glaucon and Adeimantos, that they allow us to see that principle, viz., justice, in the individual.

In the Preface to the Second Edition of The Open Society and Its Enemies Popper explains that he felt a kind of obligation "to look at Plato with highly critical eyes, just because [of] the general adoration of the 'divine philosopher'." [viii] Popper has offered a needed corrective.   Yet, as with all such correctives, the next generation may need its opposite.   The time may now be at hand to rethink Plato's political philosophy.

Harold P. Sjursen  

Mexico City

22 November 1994