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Bryan Magee's clear little introduction to thethought of Karl Popper opens with the remark that Popper's name is notyet a household word among educated people. The remainder of the book isan attempt to remedy this allegedly undeserved neglect.

The educated reader might think that Popper hasreceived adequate recognition. After all, Popper, an Austrianschoolteacher who left his native land in 1937 in anticipation of Naziannexation, gained a world-wide reputation in 1945 with the publicationofThe Open Society and Its Enemies. Later, at the London Schoolof Economics, he became Professor of Logic and Scientific method. He hasnow been a leading figure in the philosophy of science for many years;hisLogic of Scientific Discovery, a translation of a work he hadalready published before he left Austria, must now be a part of almostevery philosophy of science course in the English-speaking world.

In 1965 Popper became Sir Karl, and this year theDanish government chose him, at the age of seventy-one, for its SonningPrize, previously awarded to figures like Bertrand Russell and SirWinston Churchill, and worth around $45,000. Now, the publication ofThePhilosophy of Karl Popper (a collection of critical essays withreplies by Popper) gives Popper a niche in the Library of LivingPhilosophers, alongside predecessors like Dewey, Moore, Russell, andEinstein. In fact, Popper has upstaged them all by being the first torun to two volumes.

The rewards of academic life do not normally includeknighthoods and large sums of money. Is there any reason why Poppershould deserve more than most other philosophers? Magee thinks there is.His short book makes or endorses an extraordinary series of claims forits subject. If they were all justified, Popper would have to beregarded as the outstanding philosopher—perhaps the outstandingthinker—of the twentieth century.

Among these claims are: Popper is the greatest livingphilosopher of science, and has influenced outstandingly successfulscientists; Popper has solved the problem of induction, that"skeleton in the cupboard of philosophy" which has baffledphilosophers from David Hume to the present day; Popper published thecentral arguments against logical positivism, even before thatparticular philosophy became fashionable in the English-speaking world;Popper'sThe Open Society and Its Enemies contains "the mostscrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historicaldoctrines of Marxism by any living writer" (the quotation is fromIsaiah Berlin, but Magee adds: "I must confess I do not see how anyrational man can have read Popper's critique of Marx and still be aMarxist."); Popper has written the most powerful defense ofdemocracy in the English language.

Finally, Popper's latest achievement, his theory of"objective knowledge," offers solutions to the following rangeof problems: the relationship of bodies and minds, the objectivity ofmorality and aesthetics, problems of social and political change"which have engrossed the greatest philosophers from Plato toMarx," and problems about intellectual and artistic change thathave engrossed various other great philosophers. All this in prose thatis "massively distinguished…magnanimous and humane."

The Philosophy of Karl Popper, by the range ofcontributions it has assembled and the prestige of its contributors,also makes a strong claim for the uniqueness of its subject. There arephilosophers interested in logic or philosophy of science, like WilliamKneale, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, A.J. Ayer, and Thomas Kuhn;distinguished scientists discuss the bearing of Popper's thought onfields like physics, psychology, and neurophysiology; John Wildcriticizes Popper's interpretation of Plato, and H.B. Acton has sent inan essay vaguely related to what Popper wrote about Marx; Edward Boyle,who might have been Britain's Minister of Education had he not been tooliberal for his Conservative colleagues, tries to say what Popper'spolitical ideas meant for him as an active politician; there are essayson Popper's case against determinism, his views on the nature of time,and his theory of method in the social sciences; Ernst Gombrichcompletes the diversity by using some of Popper's remarks to illuminatethe history of art.

So… Popper is clearly an unusual figure amongprofessional philosophers: but is he the genius Magee would have usbelieve? Straight off, we can accept two of Magee's claims—or say thatthey are, at worst, exaggerations of genuine achievements. This isenough to make us take Popper seriously.

First, if Popper is not the greatest livingphilosopher of science I am not sure who is; and that Popper hasinfluenced important scientists is undeniable, since two of thecontributors toThe Philosophy of Karl Popper who acknowledge hisinfluence are Nobel Prize winners Sir John Eccles and Sir Peter Medawar.Popper's work in this field, of which I shall say more shortly, is hisprime achievement. Although, as Popper himself admits in his comments onMedawar's essay, his essential ideas had been anticipated bynineteenth-century logicians like C.S. Peirce and W. Whewell, we shouldnot let this affect our estimate of what Popper has done. While thecontinuing tradition of American pragmatism has kept Peirce's ideasalive at some American universities, it is largely to Popper that we owethe present widespread popularity of the approach to science that iscommon to the thought of Peirce, Whewell, and Popper; hence these ideasare rightly associated with Popper's name.

It is also true that Popper published importantcriticisms of logical positivism as early as 1934. At that time thisparticular philosophy had already had several years of popularity withCarnap, Schlick, and others among the philosophers of the Vienna Circle.Popper is sometimes thought to have been a member of this now almostlegendary group of influential thinkers.The Philosophy of KarlPopper should settle this issue. It includes a substantialintellectual autobiography in which Popper discusses his relations withthe Circle, as well as an essay by Victor Kraft, himself a member of theCircle, on the same topic.

Although Popper read papers to smaller"epicycles" of the Circle, he was never a member of it, and henever accepted its central doctrines. In particular he opposed theattempt to distinguish sense from nonsense by means of the"verification principle"—which holds that a statement onlymakes sense if in principle one can verify it. He argued against thisidea that it would make all metaphysics gibberish, since one had tounderstand a metaphysical theorybefore one could judge whetherit could be verified. Moreover, the principle of verification was itselfunverifiable!

In place of the principle of verification, Popperproposed his own principle of falsifiability—not, however, as a meansof distinguishing sense from nonsense, but as a means of separatingscientific theories from various kinds of pseudoscience, especiallythose, like Marxism and psychoanalysis, that were in vogue in Vienna atthe time. In contrast to Einstein, who had boldly risked his theory bypredicting unexpected outcomes for certain experiments, Marxists andFreudians claimed to explain anything and everything by their theories.By failing to make claims that might be shown false, Popper said, theyevaded refutation at the cost of their scientific status.

These and other arguments Popper published in hisLogikder Forschung, which appeared two years before A. J. Ayer'sbrilliant manifestoLanguage,Truth, and Logic spread the new gospel of positivism to theEnglish-speaking world. For many years, philosophers in Britain andAmerica took no notice of Popper's objections, perhaps because they hadnot appeared in English.

It is more difficult to assess the rest of Popper'swork. In order to give some impression of the ground covered byThePhilosophy of Karl Popper, and at the same time to consider thefurther claims that Magee makes on Popper's behalf, I shall select threemain areas. Apart from the two achievements just recognized, Popperhimself would probably give most weight to the claim that he has solvedthe ancient philosophical problem of induction. In discussing thisissue, we shall be able to see just what Popper has and has notaccomplished in the philosophy of science.

Second, I shall offer some brief comments on thenewest development of Popper's thought, the theory of "ObjectiveKnowledge," from which Popper's recently published book of essaystakes its title. Finally, I shall consider Popper's political ideas, andhis critique of Marxism. Before we come to the substance of Popper'swork, however, a word about his philosophical style may help us tounderstand why he has become such a controversial figure on the normallydecorous philosophical scene.

For Popper, philosophy is an attempt to get nearer toa true view of the world, that is, a view that corresponds to the facts.This makes philosophy a serious and important activity. To approach thetruth, we must scrutinize assumptions—metaphysical, moral, andpolitical—that affect everything we do. So philosophy is not just anintellectual game. It really does matter.

In the autobiographical section ofThe Philosophyof Karl Popper Popper tells of his firstencounter with Wittgenstein, and this incident serves to mark thecontrast between Popper's idea of philosophy and that which prevailed inEngland from the end of the Second World War until roughly the earlySixties. In 1946 Popper was invited to give a paper at Cambridge"stating some philosophical puzzle." The wording of theinvitation revealed the hand of Wittgenstein, who held that there are noreal philosophical problems, only puzzles to be cleared up by a carefulanalysis of ordinary language. Characteristically, Popper met thechallenge head on by saying that if he thought there were no genuinephilosophical problems he would not be a philosopher. After a briefexchange, Wittgenstein apparently decided that Popper was a hopelesscase, and stormed out of the room, banging the door behind him.

So, during the heyday of Wittgenstein's influence,Popper remained outside the mainstream of British philosophy, going hisown way with a stubborn sense of what was really important and what wasa mere dispute over words. It could hardly have been otherwise. This wasa period in which philosophy turned in on itself, and philosopherspuzzled away at little bits of linguistic usage that had led theirholder predecessors astray. Popper was a philosopher for the physicist,the economist, the historian, the politician. While this audienceappreciated the importance of the issues Popper was addressing himselfto, mainstream academic philosophers thought him insufficiently subtle.

At the same time, Popper's personal style did nothelp to endear him to his English colleagues. His commitment to theimportance of his subject spills over into his books and articles, whichbecome the weapons with which the battle against error is to be fought.He assails his opponents with arguments from all sides, and sometimeswith ridicule and abuse as well. As if that were not enough. Popper canalso be tediously repetitious and irritatingly egotistical, (Why, forinstance, does he have to tell us on at least three separate occasionsinObjective Knowledge that it washe who invented thelabel "Hume's problem" for the problem of induction. Whocares?)

If Popper's style puts off many, however, it alsoattracts some fervent disciples most of whom are represented inThePhilosophy of Karl Popper. For some years now there has been alittle hand of enthusiastic Popperians, carrying forward the banner ofPopper's ideas. Now and again one will fall from grace, and another willappear. Magee is obviously a recent convert; on the other hand, Popper'sreply to the essay by ImreLakatos inThe Philosophy of Karl Popper clearly marks theexcommunication of that once lofty follower, for the series of papers inwhich this former student and colleague of Popper's has tried to guidethe reader through Popper's writings is now declared, by the ultimateauthority himself, to be "unreliable and misleading," PoorLakatos.

Popper's knack of attracting disciples is anintriguing phenomenon, although one that cannot be discussed here. Theirony is that Popper, the biting critic of petty, scholastic wrangling,now has to admit that his own works have become the subjects ofscholastic disputes. It must be galling for Popper to find himselfdivided by his supporters into Popper, Popper,and Popper with consequent endless possibilitiesfor debates over interpretations. On the other hand, Popper complains sofrequently of being misunderstood —the intentions of the editor ofThePhilosophy of Karl Popper have been seriously thwarted by the factthat on several occasions Popper and his critics simply fail to engagebecause, according to Popper, the essays are directed against positionsthat he never held that one begins to suspect that the fault may liewith the author as much as with the expositor or critic.

Finally, so far as style is concerned, Popper'sdesire to swamp his opponents with criticism results in a failure todistinguish good arguments from bad. While one may applaud Popper'sconviction that real argument is preferable to the kind of suggestiveobservations that Wittgenstein and his followers used to throw out,Popper himself has debased the currency of argument by hisindiscriminate employment of any argument that comes to hand. DoesPopper really think, for instance, that it is an argument against theimpossibility of doubting one's own existence that Kipa, a Sharpa whowent further up Everest than was good for him, afterward thought he wasdead? Or even that Popper himself had the same experience when struck bylightning in the Austrian Alps (Objective Knowledge, p. 36)? Anyundergraduate philosopher would reply that believing one is dead is verydifferent from believing that one doesn't exist.

Some of Popper's replies to his critics inThePhilosophy of Karl Popper contain arguments almost as bad—forinstance, in reply to the ease for determinism presented by Feigl andMeehl, Popper remarks that they were unable to predict the form hisreply would take, although Feigl and Meehl had explicitly disclaimed theability to make such predictions.

What has Popper achieved in the philosophy ofscience, and how does his achievement relate to the problem ofinduction? Science, according to a tradition going back to FrancisBacon, proceeds from the open-minded accumulation of observations. Whenthe scientist has collected enough data he will notice a patternbeginning to emerge, and he will hypothesize that this indicates somenatural law. He then tries to confirm this law by finding furtherevidence to support it. If he succeeds he has verified his hypothesis.He has discovered another law of nature.

Popper's challenge to this view starts from thesimple logical point that a universal statement like "All swans arewhite" cannot be proved true by any number of observations of whiteswan—we might have failed to spot a black swan somewhere—but it canbe shown false by a single authentic sighting of a black swan.Scientific theories of this universal form, therefore, can never beconclusively verified, though it may be possible to falsify them.

Hence Popper says that it is wrong to begin byaccumulating observations, and it is wrong to seek confirming instancesof a theory. Instead we should advance bold conjectures—derived fromintuition, or creative genius, or any way we like—and attempt torefute them. Of two competing theories, the one that has run the greaterrisk of falsification, but has not been falsified, is the bettercorroborated. This does not mean that it is true—it may be falsifiedin the future—but it is likely to be a closer approximation to thetruth than its rival. We can never, in science, know that we havediscovered the truth although there is such a thing as truth, it is aregulative idea which we try to approach, but can never be sure ofreaching.

There is an objection to this, urged by both HilaryPutnam and Thomas Kuhn in their contributions toThePhilosophyof Karl Popper; it is always possible to deny that a theory has beenfalsified by an observation that at first does seem to falsify it. Onecan deny, for instance, that the reported sighting of a black swan wasauthentic; or one could say that if the bird was black, then bydefinition it just wasn't a swan, no matter how much it resembled swansin other respects. In general, scientific theories are not tested inisolation, but in conjunction with other assumptions; therefore it ispossible to save the theory, and explain away an observation thatcontradicts it, by claiming that one of the other assumptions was atfault.

Popper has not overlooked this objection; indeed, hementioned it in his earliest writings. His reply is that as amethodological rule we should avoid "immunizing" our theoriesin this way, although he admits that there will be times when it isworth trying to preserve a theory despite anomalous observations.

What Popper says on this point is hardly precise, andperhaps for that reason it may not satisfy his critics; at the sametime, Popper warns against the search for precision in places in whichit is not to be found. We must allow ourselves to be guided by thecircumstances of each case. In this way, Popper is able to retain hiscentral point; the asymmetry of verification and falsification.

It may be helpful to illustrate this by an example,and the example that actually influenced Popper most decisively serveswell. When Einstein conjectured that light rays passing close to a heavybody like the sun would be deflected from their normal path, this effecthad never been observed. Newtonian physics predicted no such effect.When the observation was made and Einstein's prediction confirmed,Newton's "laws" were shown to be false, despite the immenseamount of "verification" they had received over the centuries.It might in fact, have been possible to cling to Newton's theory byintroducing somead hoc hypotheses to explain the observations,but to do so seemed implausible when the new theory explained mattersmore simply. The point is that Einstein could account for all ofNewton's successes, plus one of his failures. Newton's theory could notstand; Einstein's must be a closer approximation to the truth. So itsurvives to face further testing.

Although, asThe Philosophy of Karl Poppershows, this view of science may not be unanimously accepted today, ithas much support. I regard it as a huge advance upon the previouslyaccepted idea of scientific method. Is it also a solution to the problemof induction? In two separate essays inObjective Knowledge andagain in the course of his replies to his critics inThe Philosophyof Karl Popper, Popper claims that it is. He complains, however,that other philosophers have not recognized his solution and he saysthat his critics have not understood him.

What is this notorious problem of induction? Hume'slogical problem of induction is whether we are justified in reasoningfrom instances of which we have experience to instances of which we haveno experience. For example, we have observed the sun rising on numerouspast occasions. Does this justify our belief that it will rise on afuture occasion, say tomorrow?

The assumption that this belief is justifiable is,Hume said, absolutely basic to our ideas of rational belief and rationalaction. Without it the most carefully derived expectations areultimately no more defensible than the bizarre fancies of a madman.Without a justification of induction, the distinction betweenrationality and irrationality appears to be in peril.

How does Popper answer Hume's question? First, wemust note how he interprets it. He regards it, correctly, not merely asa problem of generalizing from single cases to all cases, but as oneabout reasoning from past cases to a single future case. Healso—perhaps less soundly, but we cannot go into that here—agreeswith Hume that describing our belief about tomorrow's sunrise asprobable, rather than certain, makes no difference to the argument.

Popper then says that Hume's question has to bereformulated. The main effect of his various reformulations is to turnthe issue from a question about single cases to one about universalexplanatory theories. On that reformulated issue his answer,predictably, is that observations cannot justify the claim that auniversal theory is true, but they can allow us to say that it is false,and they can justify a preference for some theories over others.

Popper's critics point out that this does not seem toanswer Hume's question. The theory that the sun rises every day may havesurvived falsification yesterday, but is this a reason for believingthat it will survive falsification tomorrow? That was what Hume wantedto know.

Popper retorts that he has answered this question.His answer is "No." Induction isnot justifiable. Thata theory has been corroborated in the past "says nothingwhatever about future performance." The best corroboratedtheory may fall tomorrow. "It is perfectly possible that the worldat we know it, with all. Its pragmatically relevant regularities, maycompletely disintegrate in the next second."

Of course universal disintegration ispossible,but we appear to be justified in gambling heavily against it occuring inthe next second, if only because the world has not disintegrated. In anyof the previous seconds of which we have knowledge, and we have nogrounds for believing that disintegration is more likely in the nextsecond than in any other second.

Hume showed, however, that this plausible argumentsimply assumes that past observations do justify future predictions, andif we try to defend this assumption on the grounds that those who, inthe past, assumed that the future will be like the past have turned outto be right, we have again assumed what we wanted to prove. So we havean assumption that appears impossible to defend without circularity, butequally impossible to avoid making.

Popper wants to say that itis possible toavoid assuming that the future will, or probably will, be like the past,and this is why he has claimed to have solved the problem of induction.We do not have to make the assumption, he tells us, if we proceed byformulating conjectures and attempting to falsify them.

Unfortunately, we still have to act. If I did notassume that because water has come out of my tap in the past when Iturned the handle the same will happen today. I might equally sensiblyhold my glass under the electric light. On this pragmatic issue Popper'smore recent contributions do have a little more to say, but it does nothelp. He says that, as a basis for action, we should prefer "thebest-tested theory." This can only mean the theory that hassurvived refutation in the past; but why, since Popper says that pastcorroboration has nothing to do with future performance, is it rationalto prefer this? Popper says that it will be "rational" to doso "in the most obvious sense of the word known to me…. I do notknow of anything more 'rational' than a well-conducted criticaldiscussion."

The reader familiar with Popper's contempt forlinguistic philosophy will rub his eyes at this. Popper has picked upthat once trusty but now discarded weapon of linguistic philosophers,the argument from a "paradigm usage" of a word—in this case,the word "rational." The argument proves nothing. As Popperhimself has said many times, words do not matter so long as we are notmisled by them. Popper's argument is no better than Strawson's claimthat induction is valid because inductive reasoning is a paradigm ofwhat we mean by "valid" reasoning. In fact Popper'sidentification of a "well-conducted critical discussion" withthe idea of rationality is doubly unhelpful, since until we know how toestablish which theory is more likely to hold in the future we have notthe faintest idea how to conduct a "well-conducted criticaldiscussion" that has any bearing on the question we want answered.

More fundamental still is the question how, even intheory, we can possibly prefer one hypothesis to another, or take one asa nearer approximation to truth than the other, if past corroborationhas no implications for the future. Without the inductive assumption,the fact that a theory was refuted yesterday is quite irrelevant to itstruth-status today. Indeed, in the time it takes to say: "Thisresult corroborates Einstein's theory but not Newton's," all thesignificance of the remark vanishes, and we cannot go on to say thattherefore Einstein's theoryis nearer to the truth. Sojettisoning the inductive assumption makes nonsense of Popper's owntheory of the growth of scientific knowledge. While it is true that onPopper's view induction is not a means of scientific discovery, as itwas for Bacon. It remains indispensable, and the logical problem ofinduction is no nearer to solution than it was before Popper tackled it.

Popper's theory of "objective knowledge,"presented in his most recent book, is less rigorous, less tightly arguedthan other aspects of his thought. The theory itself comes over clearlyenough, but how it helps to solve important problems is not easy todiscern.

Popper divides the kinds of things that exist intothree "worlds." "World 1" is the ordinary world oftables and flesh and bone—the world that materialists say is all thereis. "World 2" is the 'world of consciousness, minds, and, ifyou believe in them, spirits—the world that idealists say is the onlyreal one. Duelists, of course, say that both worlds exist. Popper adds athird world, the world of objective knowledge. By this he does not meanthe marks on pieces of paper stored in libraries (those are World 1objects) nor the subjective consciousness of the import of these marksin the minds of scholars poring over them (this is World 2) but theknowledge itself, which is said to "exist" independently ofbeing known by a conscious subject.

Popper has a point here. Humans postulate theories,but once postulated there are logical connections between these theoriesthat are independent of human consciousness. A computer may print outformulas that are filed away without being looked at; nevertheless thestock of knowledge has been increased.

So what? It may seem an odd extension of our ideas of"existence" to apply them to knowledge in this sense, but ifPopper wishes to do so there seems little harm in it. Equally it isunclear what is gained.

Magee, of course, thinks an enormous amount isgained, but he does not explain how. Popper himself has not used thetheory to solve major philosophical problems; at most he has suggestedthat attention should be shifted away from traditional problems towardthose his theory can handle. Thus, in reply to Feigl and Meehl's casefor determinism, Popper says that what concerns him is not therefutation of determinism, but the demonstration of "the opennessof World 1"—that is, the fact that the physical world may beaffected by the mental world and the world of objective knowledge. Insome contexts this is an important point to make, but it is quitecompatible with the truth of determinism. Similarly Popper does notactually offer a solution to the problem of the relation between mindsand bodies, he merely says that the problem is altered once we admit theexistence of World 3 and its interaction with World 1 via World 2.

However, if the theory of objective knowledge istaken up and applied it may prove fruitful. It should in any case be ahealthy influence against excessive subjectivism in fields like art,literature, and perhaps even morality. These activities, Popper wants tosay, are human inventions but not merely the expression of subjectivehuman feelings. Just as mathematics is in some sense an invention of thehuman mind, but still subject to objective criteria, with real problemsand right or wrong answers to them, so art, for instance, sets its ownproblems, and solves or fails to solve them.

Unfortunately the application of the theory to fieldslike art and morality is only hinted at, and none of the essays ineitherObjective Knowledge orThe Philosophy of Karl Popperattempts a detailed application. Part of the trouble is that Popper hasneglected one of his own sound maxims: start from a specific problem andprevious attempts to solve it. Instead, the theory of objectiveknowledge is an attempt to "enrich our picture of the world."This does not suit Popper's argumentative style. The change of approachleads. Magee astray to such an extent that he excitedly reports thesuccess of the idea in illuminating a variety of fields, apparentlyoblivious of the un-Popperian methodology this implies. Whereas in anearlier chapter Magee criticized psychoanalysis and Marxism on thegrounds that "once your eyes were opened you saw confirminginstances everywhere, the world was full ofverifications of thetheory," now he so far forgets himself as to report that Popper'stheory accounts for "virtually all processes of organicdevelopment," "all learning processes," mathematics, art,human relationships, etc. Magee fails to ask what would falsify thetheory—a question to which there is no easy answer.

We have seen that Popper's interest in scientificmethod developed as a result of his realization that a theory likeEinstein's riskedrefutation in a way that Marxism or psychoanalysis did not. Oneoutcome was Popper's defense of this method of formulating and testingscientific theories. The other, which did not emerge in print until muchlater, was his critique of the claims to knowledge of social, ratherthan physical, phenomena made by those writers whom Popper calls"historieists." By this term Popper refers to those whoapproach the social sciences with the aim of predicting the course ofhistory, an aim they believe attainable once we reveal the general lawsand patterns that are supposed to underlie the historical process.

Popper's attack on historicism forms the core of twoseparate volumes:The Poverty of Historicism,[1]and the second volume ofThe Open Society and Its Enemies. Theformer is a general critique of writers as diverse as Comte, Mill, Marx,and Toynbee; the latter concentrates on Hegel and Marx.

In his lucid essay on historicism inThePhilosophy of Karl Popper, Alan Donagan reminds us that when PopperwroteThe Poverty of Historicism the belief that iron lawsdetermined the course our future would take was relatively widespread.Undoubtedly Popper influenced the decline in popularity of this idea inWestern intellectual circles, although the continuing perverse refusalof events to conform to the best historicist predictions may have beeneven more influential. Now that some radical circles have revivedhistoricist views, however, it is worth asking how many of Popper'sarguments are still telling.

One important point that Donagan makes and Popper, inhis reply, appears to accept is that although particular historicistshave often been confused about their aims, and especially about how themethod of the natural sciences might be applied to history, the aim ofmaking historical predictions is not itself incoherent, and it cannot beshown merely by philosophical arguments that it will never succeed. Themost that Popper has shown is that predictions may always be invalidatedby unpredictable advances in knowledge that change the initialconditions on which the predictions are based; but this still leavesconsiderable scope for suitably qualified predictions.

So contemporary historicists cannot be refuted simplybecause they claim knowledge of the course of history. Nor are theylikely to be impressed by Popper's arguments against specifichistoricists, for of those Popper discusses only Hegel and Marx arestill fashionable in radical circles and, as we shall see, what Poppersays about these two is hardly definitive.

What then remains of Popper's critique? I believe thecore of it—the application of the critical method to the socialsphere—is as valid today as it ever was. Those who believe thatinterpretations of history in terms of class struggle (or, for thatmatter, in terms of the struggle between "Aryan" and"non-Aryan" races) arescientific theories, rather thanmore or less fertile sources for formulating hypotheses that need to betasted, should face the challenge of formulating their theory so that itis testable. That an interpretation of history is capable of ordering agood many facts does not demonstrate its truth, any more than do similarclaims about past conjunctions between the positions of the planets andevents on earth demonstrate the truth of astrology. The historicist,like the astrologer, must say what future developments, or newdiscoveries about the past, would refute his theory; and if he cannot orwill not do so, his claim to scientific knowledge need not be takenseriously.

Popper's attack on the two historicists mostinfluential today—Hegel and Marx—did not help his general attack onhistoricism. The scholarly furor provoked byThe Open Societygave those opposed to Popper's views a chance to impugn his scholarshipand ignore his arguments.

Popper's chapter on Hegel inThe Open Societyis the most vituperative of the entire polemical work. Popper brandsHegel an outright fraud who deliberately adopted a bombastic and obscurestyle in order to conceal the real emptiness of his thought; his one aimwas to serve his employer, the reactionary Prussian monarchy, to whomhe, in turn, owed his prestige and influence. All this is supported bylong quotations from Hegel, but the passages are not quoted whole;instead single sentences and phrases are plucked out of their contextand strung together. By this technique one could make most writers lookfoolish; Hegel is a particularly easy victim because he discusses eachaspect of a topic separately. When writing of, say, the state, hestresses the collective side of politics; when writing of civil societyhe gives more emphasis to individualism, and the true picture isobtained only when both sides are brought together. But Popper, in thischapter, was not trying to understand Hegel: he was trying to destroyhim.[2]

In the light of this, Hegelians may now allowthemselves a smile at Popper's admission, inObjective Knowledge,that Hegel is one of his forerunners, both in the theory of objectiveknowledge itself and in Popper's schema of the evolutionary growth ofknowledge from one problem, via a tentative solution of that problem,through criticism of this solution, to a further problem. AlthoughPopper tries to emphasize the differences, students of Hegel will haveno difficulty in recognizing the Hegelian concept of knowledge in theformer, and Hegelian dialectics in the latter. Popper's (and Magee's)account of the difference between Hegelian dialectics and Popper'sschema is based on the mistaken idea that standing contradictions aretolerated in the Hegelian system, but not in Popper's; actually Hegeldoes not accept contradiction any more than Popper does. According toHegel it is the impossibility of tolerating a contradiction at any givenstage that forces us to move on to another position that can reconcilethe previously contradictory points of view. Further contradictions thenbecome apparent and the process repeats itself. The parallel withPopper's idea is very close.

It is surprising that Popper's treatment of Hegel istotally neglected in the long Schilpp volumes; even more disappointing,however, is the absence of any critical assessment of Popper's writingsabout Marx. There is a contribution by H.B. Acton on Marxist Ethics, butActon's attitude to Marx is so similar to Popper's that he is hardly asuitable choice for a critic, and all Acton sets out to do, in his ownwords, is "add to" the account of Marx that Popper has given.Maybe, though, something should also be subtracted. In any case, Magee'sstriking assertion thatThe Open Society contains a definitiverefutation of Marx requires a closer look. According to Magee, Popper'smethod is "to seek out and attack an opponent's case at itsstrongest." In order to do so Popper "sees if any of itsweaknesses can be removed and any of its formulations improved on."Quite apart from the humorous side of this statement taken as adescription of Popper's treatment of Hegel, it need hardly be pointedout that such a procedure has its pitfalls. Marx might have preferredbeing understood correctly to having his ideas reformulated by aprofessed opponent, even one sincerely attempting to make improvements.

Popper's Marx is a rigid determinist who thought hehad discovered the inexorable laws that control our destiny, laws in theface of which we are "mere puppets, irresistibly pulled by economicwires."[3] Using this discovery, Marx, like agood historicist, is supposed to have considered himself in a positionto prophesy the allegedly inevitable outcome of all human history.

Popper is not the first to have misinterpreted Marxin this way. Indeed, this is one of those fortunate instances in whichthe author lived long enough to rebut the misinterpretation. In a letterwritten in reply to Mikhailovsky, a contemporary critic, Marx deniesthat he has given "a historico-philosophic theory of the generalpath that every people is fated to tread." Mikhailovsky, heprotests, "is both honouring and shaming me too much."[4].It was in reply to this sort of dogmatic, rigidly deterministicinterpretation of his ideas that Marx, late in life, used to say that hewas not a Marxist.[5]

Admittedly, Marx was being a little disingenuous. AsEngels wrote in a letter to Bloch, he and Marx were partly to blame forthe misunderstanding, having felt the need to stress the economic sidein opposition to those who denied it any role at all in history. Still,as Engels goes on to say, one has only to look at Marx's own historicalwritings, especiallyThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,to find that Marx is well aware that, as the first page of that worksays, "men make their own history," though under circumstanceshanded down from the past. The same point is also to be found in quitetheoretical, non-historical texts—the "Theses on Feuerbach"is the classic example.

This is not to say that Popper's attack on Marxmisses its mark entirely. Marx sometimes, and Engels more frequently,wrote as if Marxism were a body of scientific knowledge that includedgeneral laws governing all historical development. Because thisconception of Marxism is relatively easy to grasp, and attractive to aperiod impressed with the achievements of science in other areas, it hasproved popular with later Marxists. Since most of the predictions thatcan be culled from the original general laws have turned out to befalse, one would have to be extraordinarily biased to hold this viewtoday. This is the only possible interpretation of Marxism that Poppercould be said to have refuted.

It is not, in any case, a tenable interpretation. Wehave seen that late in life Marx and Engels rejected the idea of generallaws determining all history. In his early years too, when Marxtransformed what he thought sound in Hegel's philosophy into the ideasthat we now associate with his name, he made no claims to scientificcertainty. Moreover, Marx continued to think in the categories andterminology of Hegelian philosophy even while planning his most"scientific" works, as the recently translated rough draft ofCapitalshows.[6] In the light of these texts—whichPopper admits he had not read when he wroteThe Open Society—Marxappears less the Newton of the social sciences, more the philosopherstruggling to apply to the real world the insights gained from hisHegelian education.

The fact remains that these insights do proveilluminating. A proper appreciation of Marxism would grant itsphilosophical orientation and would see it as suggestive of ways oflooking at man and society that are scientifically fruitful, although itis not itself a full-blown science. We may disregard Marx's sometimesexcessive claims to certainty and his mistaken predictions, and yetagree that he has pointed out a path along which the social sciences mayprogress. Before Marx it was common to treat man and his ideas as iftheir history and development were independent of the fulfilling of moremundane needs; since Marx the idea that man's ideological, political,social, and economic activities are bound up together and cannot beunderstood fully in isolation has become generally accepted. For thisreason Marx could justly claim that his insights have made a science ofsociety possible.

I cannot see why Popper should want to deny any ofthis. It fits well with his view of the role metaphysics can play inscience, as a source of hypotheses for the scientist to test; and itfits too with his own admission that his treatment of Plato and Hegel inThe Open Society was influenced by Marx, and that a return topre-Marxian social science is inconceivable. To say that, today, norational man can fail to be a Marxist would be an exaggeration—but noworse an exaggeration than Magee's remark that after reading Popper norational man can remain a Marxist.

Finally, what of Popper's political suggestions?Magee notes that these have tended to get lost among the torrents ofcriticism of other writers that comprise the bulk of Popper's writingson social and political theory. On the other hand, Edward Boyle's essayinThe Philosophy of Karl Popper reminds us that the positivedoctrines ofThe Open Society did have a considerable influenceon bright young politicians, of both major parties, in Britain after thewar. Although it is absurd to rate Popper's defense of democracy higherthan that of, say, John Stuart Mill—as Magee apparentlydoes—Popper's views on democracy are worthy of serious consideration.

The special feature of Popper's defense ofdemocracy—and indeed the unifying element in his approach to fields asdiverse as philosophy of science and political philosophy—is hisapplication of the critical method to social and political questions. Incontrast to the common belief that dictatorship is a more efficient formof government than democracy, Popper argues plausibly that an opensociety, with free institutions and ample opportunity for criticism, islikely to find better ways of doing things in the long run. Freeinstitutions allow us to change our minds about how the nation should berun, and to put this change into effect without bloodshed. Given apolitical system that functions in this manner, anyone who uses force topromote his own policies is, like it or not, abandoning a peacefulmethod of making decisions in favor of one that must ultimately rely onforce to resolve conflicts.

On similar grounds, Popper advocates "piecemealsocial engineering" rather than utopian planning. Piecemealimprovements can be corrected when they look as if they are going wrong,whereas the attempt to bring about utopia is likely to involve greatupheavals which may well result in a situation far worse than that withwhich we began. As in science, Popper prefers to eliminate error ratherthan to strive for perfection.

Behind all this lies Popper's "negativeutilitarianism"—the idea, sound as a maxim of practical politicsif not as an ultimate ethical principle, that the relief of sufferingshould take priority over the promotion of happiness.

All this is highly persuasive. The difficultquestion, though, is whether we really can improve matters piecemeal.Popper's political philosophy suited a period that was more optimistic,although at the same time more fearful, than ours. The Western form ofdemocracy appeared to be coping with its problems reasonably well.People were not perfectly happy, but they did not seem miserable either,except for isolated "problem areas" that were in the processof being cleared up. There was a general consensus that we had found agood form of society, based on a healthy spirit of tolerance andcompromise, and the path ahead was definitely upward. Moreover, thealternative to this moderately progressive compromise seemed to involvethe risk of plunging us back into the totalitarian nightmare againstwhich Western civilization had just fought a long and bloody struggle.Given this outlook, any form of political radicalism seemed folly.

Now we have had the experience of this same form ofWestern democracy apparently unable to provide peace abroad and securityat home for its citizens; the drive toward equality has either stoppedor gone into reverse, and the leading democratic nation has exported anew nightmare to Indochina. The issue is no longer whether we shouldrisk our solid achievements in an attempt to bring about utopia: theissue is how to end the appalling misery for which our society has beenand still is responsible.

Anyone seeking to revive Popper's political ideasneeds to show that they still apply in the grimmer post-Vietnamatmosphere. Short of this, the best that can be said on Popper's behalfis that it is valuable to have an intelligent and humane defense ofmoderation to place against a fashionable radicalism that is in dangerof becoming intellectually lazy for want of well-argued opposition.

Popper is undoubtedly an important thinker. If, inthis review, I have been largely critical, this must be set against thebackground of excessive claims that are made for his ideas by hisdisciples, and by Popper himself. Popper must be admired by anyone whovalues a commitment to the method of critical discussion, and a seriousapproach to the progress of knowledge and the improvement of the humancondition. In Magee he has found a lucid, sympathetic expositor.Popperhas its faults, but—like the faults of its subject—they are part ofa thoroughly worthwhile whole. Magee is to be numbered among Popper'sdevotees, and this gives the book its fervor and its sense ofintellectual excitement. Provided the reader approaches it in askeptical frame of mind, it is a fine layman's guide to the work of aprolific thinker. The same cannot be said for the more solidThePhilosophy of Karl Popper, but these two volumes will no doubtfurnish professional philosophers with plenty of material for newscholarly debates about Popper.

Notes

1 First published inEconomica, N.S. vols. XI and XII, 1944-1945; first published in book form in 1957, Second Edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960: Harper Torchbook, 1964.

2 Popper's distortion of Hegel has been ably exposed by, among others, Walter Kaufmann in "The Hegel Myth and Its Method," inFrom Shakespeare to Existentialism (Beacon Press, 1959.)

3The Open Society and Its Enemies, (5th Edition, vol. 2, p. 101.)

4Letter to the Editorial Board of "Fatherland Notes" (1877.) This and the other letters referred to below are included inMarx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy edited by L. Feuer (Doubleday Anchor, 1959.)

5Engels to Schmidt, 1890. Magee mentions this remark (p. 81) but quite misunderstands its import.

6Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus, (Random House, $15.00; Vintage, $3.95, paper).