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The Liberalism of Karl Popper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

John N. Gray
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DESPITE ITS WIDE INFLUENCE, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF KARL POPPER has received, until recently, remarkably little systematic attention from academic political theorists. Hailed by Isaiah Berlin as the most formidable of Marxism's living critics and reviled by Marxists as a prominent luminary of that White Emigration whose pernicious influence is mainly responsible for the ideological rejuvenation of a moribund reactionary culture, canonized as a prophet of freedom and enterprise and lumped together with such despised conservatives as Oakeshott, Namier and Butterfield as one of those who want only ‘to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering’, Popper incontestably has been a storm centre of several major ideological controversies. Equally, Popper's dissident reinterpretations of the thought of Plato and Hegel, like his defence of value-freedom and methodological individualism in the social sciences, have generated massive and subtly ramified literatures, while the form of critical rationalism which has been developed by some of his disciples has been seen, both by its proponents and by its enemies, as the foremost contribution to the contemporary struggle against irrationalism.

Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1976 , pp. 337 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1976

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References

1 Karl Marx; His Life and Environment, third edition, 1963.

2 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in Student Power, 1969, p. 231.

3 Prophets of Freedom and Enterprise, ed. Michael Ivens, 1975.

4 E. H. Carr, What is History?, Penguin edition, 1967, p. 156.

5 Lee W. W. Bartley III, ‘Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality’, in M. Bunge, The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, 1964; and the writings of P. K. Feyerabend, especially Against Method, 1975.

6 Among Popper’s radical critics are: Maurice Cornforth, The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: a Reply to Dr Karl Popper’s Refutations of Marxism, 1968; James Petras, ‘Popperism: the Scarcity of Reason’, Science and Society, Winter 1966; A. C. Macintyre ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, in Out of Apathy, ed. by E. P. Thompson, 1960; Michael Freeman, ‘Sociology and Utopia: some Reflections on the Social Philosophy of Karl Popper’, British Journal of Sociology, March 1975. Popper’s advocacy of piecemeal social engineering has been subjected to a very different kind of criticism by two Wittgensteinian philosophers, Rush Rhees and Peter Winch, in Mind 1947 and the Library of Living Philosophers, Philosophy of Karl Popper, pp. 889–904. Popper has himself answered these criticisms in the latter volume, pp. 1165–72.

7 I use the word ‘proposal’ advisedly so as to stress the normative character of Popper’s falsificationism, which he himself stressed from the start, but which subsequent critics (e.g. Lakatos, ‘Popper on Demarcation and Induction’, Library of Living Philosophers) have not always fully acknowledged. See Logic of Scientific Discovery, pp. 50–6, for a criticism of naturalistic approaches to the problem of scientific method.

8 See L. Kolakowski, Positivist Philosophy, where the legend of Popper’s positivism is still alive. It is ironical that the greatest living scourge of positivism should continue to be described as a positivist.

9 The three worlds terminology originates with Sir John Eccles.

10 See Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 193–200.

11 It has been argued that, insofar as any criticism of comprehensively critical rationalism only reinforces it by demonstrating its criticizability, the theory is self‐validating and therefore self‐defeating. See on this, J. W. N. Watkins, ‘Comprehensively Critical Rationalism’, Philosophy, 1969.

12 The expression ‘dynamic scepticism’ is Popper’s; Objective Knowledge, p. 99.

13 Popper, 1973, p. 83.

14 Conversations with Philosophers, ed. by B. Magee, pp. 79–80.

15 Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 1970, p. 225.

16 Poverty of Historicism, p. 3.

17 Ibid., p. 67.

18 Michael Freeman, ‘Sociology and Utopia: some reflections on the social philosophy of Karl Popper’, op. cit.

19 Freeman, op. cit., pp. 22, 31–2.

20 Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief, 1974, p. 172.

21 Freeman, op. cit., p. 26.

22 Ibid., p. 27.

23 Ibid., p. 32.

24 The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II, p. 187.

25 Poverty of Historicism, p. 63.

26 Ibid., pp. 79–80.

27 Ibid., p. 68.

28 Freeman, op. cit., p. 26.

29 Ibid..

30 Poverty of Historicism, p. 68.

31 Objective Knowledge, p. 22.

32 Freeman, op. tit., p. 24.

33 Poverty of Historicism, pp. 155–6.

34 Ibid., p. 155.

35 Gellner, op. cit., p. 172.

36 Poverty of Historicism, p. 97.

37 Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II, p. 138.

38 The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Library of Living Philosophers, p. 1025.

39 Poverty of Historicism, Section 31.

40 Freeman, op. cit., p. 25.

41 A. C. Macintyre, ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, op. cit., p. 221.

42 Poverty of Historicism, p. 66.

43 Freeman, op. cit., pp. 29–30.

44 Gellner, op. cit., p. 172.

45 On Liberty, Everyman ed, p. 73.

46 Feyerabend, Paul, ‘Against Method’, in Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4, p. 112 Google Scholar, footnote 52, is one of the few who have noted Mill’s falsifi‐cationism in On Liberty.

47 On Liberty, pp. 97–8.

48 For example, Martin Hollis, ‘J. S. Mill’s Political Philosophy of Mind’, in Philosophy, 1973; Benjamin Barber, ‘Solipsistic Politics: Russell’s Empiricist Liberalism’, Political Studies, March 1975.

49 See, for example, W. W. Bartley III and M. Bunge, 1964, The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, ‘Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality’, p. 19ff.

50 R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, p. 88.