Brian Gladish published The Society Most Conducive to Problem Solving: Karl Popper and Piecemeal Social Engineering in The Independent Review. I'm reposting my comments here.
Thanks for sharing the article. I found your comments on Popper’s thinking much more accurate than most secondary sources.
In case you hadn’t seen it yet, I wanted to share Popper’s "The Power Of Television” (After the Open Society, ch. 48). In it, Popper advocates TV censorship, particularly regarding depicting violence. Excerpt:
What I propose is that such an organization be created by the state for all people who are involved in the production of television. Everybody who is connected with it must have a licence. This licence can be withdrawn from him for life, if he acts against certain principles. That is my way of introducing discipline into this subject. Everybody must be organized, and everybody must have a licence. Everybody who is doing something which he should not do by the rules of the organization can lose his licence – the licence can be withdrawn from him by a kind of court. So he is constantly under supervision, and he constantly has to fear that if he does something bad he may lose his licence. This constant supervision is something far more effective than is censorship.
Popper said this in 1992 and was particularly eager to have these ideas widely shared. It shows how limited his "lifetime drift toward classical liberalism” was.
Your article mentions Popper’s "complicated scheme of seminationalization”. I wanted to share with people what that means. The letter is available in After the Open Society, ch. 34. Quote:
The comparatively easy problem is the nationalization problem. I suggest, in brief, that the state should take a share of 51 per cent of the shares of all public companies (= with shares quoted on the Stock Exchange). However, (a) they should not be interfered with in general, only if the situation warrants it, and (b) only 40 per cent, or 41 per cent, of the income should go to the state to start with.
Although I admire and advocate Popper’s epistemology, this is awful.
I had a quick comment on this part of the paper:
But it is somewhat harsh to criticize Popper for this failure [to advocate anarcho-capitalism] because he had contemporaries who were better equipped to make this leap—Mises and Hayek, for example—but who did not.
Why bring up anarchism? That criticism would be harsh, but we can fairly criticize Popper’s rejection of minarchism, minimal and limited government, and classical liberalism.
Here’s the big picture as I see it. Popper gave us:
(1) Critical Rationalism & reason -> (2) linking arguments -> (3) freedom & non-violence -> (4) linking arguments -> (5) interventionist government
His 1-3 were correct and his 4-5 were incorrect. His 1 was especially original and valuable. We can form our own system using Popper’s 1-3 followed by Misean arguments linking freedom & non-violence to e.g. laissez faire capitalism and limited government. Or we could follow with anarchist arguments to replace 4-5. 1-3 function independently of what we think freedom & non-violence imply.
Popper’s 4-5 were unoriginal and added nothing significant to the debate. He basically followed Marx in thinking that true freedom requires the forcible prevention of economic exploitation, e.g. in OSE:
I believe that the injustice and inhumanity of the unrestrained 'capitalist system' described by Marx cannot be questioned
Note how blatantly he contradicts his own fallibilist epistemology which teaches us that all ideas can be questioned.
Anyway, Popper was right to link reason with non-violence (and right to link reason with evolution, to reject induction, etc.), and we can and should use that part of Popper’s thinking without using his Marxist followup.
What do you think?
PS: FYI, there’s a typo in the 12th endnote: “seemto” instead of “seem to”.
Messages (4)
Cool
I like this writeup. I can't access the original article easily on my phone but I'll try a few methods when I get home. I'm curious to see how Brian responds. Was this an email to him?
My favourite part:
> Here’s the big picture as I see it. Popper gave us:
> (1) Critical Rationalism & reason -> (2) linking arguments -> (3) freedom & non-violence -> (4) linking arguments -> (5) interventionist government
> His 1-3 were correct and his 4-5 were incorrect. His 1 was especially original and valuable. We can form our own system using Popper’s 1-3 followed by Misean arguments linking freedom & non-violence to e.g. laissez faire capitalism and limited government. Or we could follow with anarchist arguments to replace 4-5. 1-3 function independently of what we think freedom & non-violence imply.
What I like about this is that you point out how 1 -> 3 are independent of 4 -> 5, and that we can find the former valuable and significant while still validly criticizing and rejecting the latter as unoriginal and not a significant contribution. I imagine Popper would have voted for Bernie today. Why do you think he had this sort of authoritarian streak of thinking somehow nestled within all the individual liberty and fallible philosophy he developed? Is DD's political philosophy a much better reflection of CR than Popper's? Is DD's set of ideas and mind more integrated in general than Popper's was?
Any response from Gladish?
#15724 Yeah and it was fairly long but not public and IMO boring. He didn't give direct responses to my point about anarchy or my point about 1-5. He also didn't ask me a question and or create good ways for conversation to continue.
Hello Elliot,
Thanks for taking the time to read the paper and comment!
Yes, I have seen "The Power of Television." I first saw it in Phil Benesch's book , *The Viennese Socrates: Karl Popper and the Reconstruction of Progressive Politics*. There is no doubt that Popper retained a strong interventionist streak through his life, although his preface to the 2nd edition of *Open Society*, after having read Hayek's *The Road to Serfdom*, signals a retreat from his most extreme position.
I believe the paper is quite specific on a number of points, including that there is no argument that Popper would have agreed to my application of his philosophy or that his political views were anything other than "politics with romance" (as opposed to Buchanan's politics without romance). In particular, the unsent letter on seminationalization demonstrates that his view of piecemeal social engineering in the political sphere did not mention a method by which the plan could be falsified or any indication that he would favor complete reversal (re-privatization) if it failed.
On the subject of "politics with romance," one of the referees on the paper repeatedly advised that I should indicate that Popper was concerned about negative consequences and advocating for critical discussion of the engineers' plans (one can even see Jeremy Shearmur crediting Popper while pining for a forum in which we might present criticisms and work out conflict—Popper and Democracy Today). In order to answer this criticism I introduced more material painting Popper in an authoritarian light—material primarily from his writings in the 1940s. In doing so I may have made him sound more authoritarian than he might have been, especially late in life (see his comments on Mises in "The communist road to self enslavement," also in *After the Open Society*). It is true that, while warning about state power, he never gave up the idea of the state as a potential problem solver, as is the case in our common political discourse.
You point out that you admire and advocate Popper's epistemology, and, of course, that is the theme of the paper—heavy criticism of the political, with a positive focus on the free market component of social engineering and the epistemology that dovetails quite well with markets.
I criticize Popper's inability to discard the assumption of the state to answer his own question, "How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?" I advocate for the possibility of social experimentation as was done by the 19th century utopians, not for the institution of anarcho-capitalism. Of course, I expect that experiments that are market based will be more successful, but whether or not the property regime matches Rothbard's or some other is open to debate and testing.
I think that Popper fell prey to a problem that also seemed to haunt Hayek—that some outcomes would be unacceptable, and that there must be some power to step in and remedy the situation. The following problem is that of how we will control this power. Hence the discussion of criticizing the social engineers on Popper's part, and the effort to construct a constitution on Hayek's. There is no solution until there is the recognition that that power will create worse outcomes than those it is meant to remedy.
To me, the big picture is simply trial-and-error learning—evolution. The problem is that the state prevents the experimentation that would benefit us all. Because we all have grown up in political systems, we are prone to political thinking and the belief that whatever world we would like to live in must be imposed on others. We have moved away from this type of thinking in religion and many faiths exist in relative harmony, while in the fairly recent past Catholics and Protestants were deadly enemies fighting for universal domination. Perhaps all we need is a right to secede in place.
I hope this response has been useful in clearing some things up.
Regards,
Brian
P.S. Footnote 12 looks OK to me, both in the pdf and my printed copy.