Madsen Pirie Madsen Pirie

Trial and Error

Karl Popper is rightly esteemed by those of a liberal persuasion for his many contributions to the cause.  In The Open Society and its Enemies – volume 1 he took issue with Plato.  He showed that although Plato claimed to be seeking just and virtuous rulers, his Republic resembled the totalitarian warrior state of Sparta with detailed control over every aspect of its citizens' lives.  The point, said Popper, was not to choose the best rulers, but to prevent bad or incompetent rulers from doing too much damage.

In volume 2 of The Open Society he took issue first with Hegel, then with Marx, showing that their ideas must lead to coercion and that they contain the roots of totalitarianism, a theme he developed in The Poverty of Historicism, where he countered the socialists' claim that history is moving in their direction toward an inevitable goal.  

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