The Open Society and its Enemies

Hegel and Marx

Karl Popper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135552633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in 1945, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a 'vigorous and profound defence of democracy', its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems. Popper's highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thought of great philosophers and the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and for why it demands to be read both today and in years to come. This is the second of two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies.

NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. That Aristotle’s criticism of Plato is very frequently, and in important places, unmerited, has been admitted by many students of the history of philosophy. It is one of the few points in which even the admirers of Aristotle find it difficult to defend him, since usually they are admirers of Plato as well. Zeller, to quote just one example, comments (cp. Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, English translation by Costelloe and Muirhead, 1897, II, 261, n. 2), upon the distribution of land in Aristotle’s Best State: ‘There is a similar plan in Plato’s Laws, 745c seqq.; Aristotle, however, in Politics 1265b24 considers Plato’s arrangement, merely on account of a trifling difference, highly objectionable.’ A similar remark is made by G. Grote, Aristotle (Ch. XIV, end of second paragraph). In view of many criticisms of Plato which strongly suggest that envy of Plato’s originality is part of his motive, Aristotle’s much-admired solemn assurance (Nicomachean Ethics, I, 6, 1) that the sacred duty of giving preference to truth forces him to sacrifice even what is most dear to him, namely, his love for Plato, sounds to me somewhat hypocritical.

2. Cp. Th. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (I am quoting from the German Edition, III, 298, i.e. Book 7, Ch. 31, § 6). See especially Aristotle’s Politics, 1313a.—

G. C. Field (in Plato and His Contemporaries, 114 f.) defends Plato and Aristotle against the ‘reproach … that, with the possibility, and, in the case of the latter, the actuality of this’ (i.e. the Macedonian conquest) ‘before their eyes, they … say nothing of these new developments’. But Field’s defence (perhaps directed against Gomperz) is unsuccessful, in spite of his strong comments upon those who make such a reproach. (Field says: ‘this criticism betrays … a singular lack of understanding.’) Of course, it is correct to claim, as Field does, ‘that a hegemony like that exercised by Macedon … was no new thing’; but Macedon was in Plato’s eyes at least half-barbarian and therefore a natural enemy. Field is also right in saying that ‘the destruction of independence by Macedon’ was not a complete one; but did Plato or Aristotle foresee that it was not to become complete? I believe that a defence like Field’s cannot possibly succeed, simply because it would have to prove too much; namely, that the significance of Macedon’s threat could not have been clear, at the time, to any observer; but this is disproved, of course, by the example of Demosthenes. The question is: why did Plato, who like Isocrates had taken some interest in pan-Hellenic nationalism (cp. notes 48–50 to chapter 8, Rep., 470, and the Eighth Letter, 353e, which Field claims to be ‘certainly genuine’) and who was apprehensive of a ‘Phœnician and Oscan’ threat to Syracuse, why did he ignore Macedon’s threat to Athens? A likely reply to the corresponding question concerning Aristotle is: because he belonged to the pro-Macedonian party. A reply in Plato’s case is suggested by Zeller (op. cit., II, 41) in his defence of Aristotle’s right to support Macedon: ‘So satisfied was Plato of the intolerable character of the existing political position that he advocated sweeping changes.’ (‘Plato’s follower’, Zeller continues, referring to Aristotle, ‘could the less evade the same convictions, since he had a keener insight into men and things … ’) In other words, the answer might be that Plato’s hatred of Athenian democracy exceeded so much even his pan-Hellenic nationalism that he was, like Isocrates, looking forward to the Macedonian conquest.

3. This and the following three quotations are from Aristotle’s Politics, 1254b–1255a; 1254a; 1255a; 1260a.—See also: 1252a, f. (I, 2, 2–5); 1253b, ff. (I, 4, 386, and especially I, 5); 1313b (V, 11, 11). Furthermore: Metaphysics, 1075a, where freemen and slaves are also opposed ‘by nature’. But we find also the passage: ‘Some slaves have the souls of freemen, and others their bodies’ (Politics, 1254b). Cp. with Plato’s Timaeus, 51e, quoted in note 50 (2), to chapter 8.—For a trifling mitigation, and a typically ‘balanced judgement’ of Plato’s Laws, see Politics, 1260b: ‘Those’ (this is a somewhat typical Aristotelian way of referring to Plato) ‘are wrong who forbid us even to converse with slaves and say that we should only use the language of command; for slaves must be admonished’ (Plato had said, in Laws, 777e, that they should not be admonished) ‘even more than children.’ Zeller, in his long list of the personal virtues of Aristotle (op. cit., I, 44), mentions his ‘nobility of principles’ and his ‘benevolence to slaves’. I cannot help remembering the perhaps less noble but certainly more benevolent principle put forward much earlier by Alcidamas and Lycophron, namely, that there should be no slaves at all. W. D. Ross (Aristotle, 2nd ed., 1930, pp. 241 ff.) defends Aristotle’s attitude towards slavery by saying: ‘Where to us he seems reactionary, he may have seemed revolutionary to them’, viz., to his contemporaries. In support of this view, Ross mentions Aristotle’s doctrine that Greek should not enslave Greek. But this doctrine was hardly very revolutionary since Plato had taught it, probably half a century before Aristotle. And that Aristotle’s views were indeed reactionary can be best seen from the fact that he repeatedly finds it necessary to defend them against the doctrine that no man is a slave by nature, and further from his own testimony to the anti-slavery tendencies of the Athenian democracy.

An excellent statement on Aristotle’s Politics can be found in the beginning of Chapter XIV of G. Grote’s Aristotle, from which I quote a few sentences: ‘The scheme … of government proposed by Aristotle, in the two last books of his Politics, as representing his own ideas of something like perfection, is evidently founded upon the Republic of Plato: from whom he differs in the important circumstance of not admitting either community of property or community of wives and children. Each of these philosophers recognizes one separate class of inhabitants, relieved from all private toil and all money-getting employments, and constituting exclusively the citizens of the commonwealth. This small class is in effect the city—the commonwealth: the remaining inhabitants are not a part of the commonwealth, they are only appendages to it— indispensable indeed, but still appendages, in the same manner as slaves or cattle.’ Grote recognizes that Aristotle’s Best State, where it deviates from the Republic, largely copies Plato’s Laws. Aristotle’s dependence upon Plato is prominent even where he expresses his acquiescence in the victory of democracy; cp. especially Politics, III, 15; 11–13; 1286b (a parallel passage is IV, 13; 10; 1297b). The passage ends by saying of democracy: ‘No other form of government appears to be possible any longer’; but this result is reached by an argument that follows very closely Plato’s story of the decline and fall of the state in Books VIII–IX of the Republic; and this in spite of the fact that Aristotle criticizes Plato’s story severely (for instance in V, 12; 1316a, f.).

4. Aristotle’s use of the word ‘banausic’ in the sense of ‘professional’ or ‘money earning’ is clearly shown in Politics, VIII, 6, 3 ff. (1340b) and especially 15 f. (1341b). Every professional, for example a flute player, and of course every artisan or labourer, is ‘banausic’, that is to say, not a free man, not a citizen, even though he is not a real slave; the status of a ‘banausic’ man is one of ‘partial or limited slavery’ (Politics, I, 14; 13; 1260a/b). The word ‘banausos’ derives, I gather, from a pre-Hellenic word for ‘fire-worker’. Used as an attribute it means that a man’s origin and caste ‘disqualify him from prowess in the field’. (Cp. Greenidge, quoted by Adam in his edition of the Republic, note to 495e30.) It may be translated by ‘low-caste’, ‘cringing’, ‘degrading’, or in some contexts by ‘upstart’. Plato used the word in the same sense as Aristotle. In the Laws (741e and 743d), the term ‘banausia’ is used to describe the depraved state of a man who makes money by means other than the hereditary possession of land. See also the Republic, 495e and 590c. But if we remember the tradition that Socrates was a mason; and Xenophon’s story (Mem. II, 7); and Antisthenes’ praise of hard work; and the attitude of the Cynics; then it seems unlikely that Socrates agreed with the aristocratic prejudice that money earning must be degrading. (The Oxford English Dictionary proposes to render ‘banausic’ as ‘merely mechanical, proper to a mechanic’, and quotes Grote, Eth. Fragm., vi, 227 = Aristotle, 2nd ed., 1880, p. 545; but this rendering is much too narrow, and Grote’s passage does not justify this interpretation, which may originally rest upon a misunderstanding of Plutarch. It is interesting that in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream the term ‘mere mechanicals’ is used precisely in the sense of ‘banausic’ men; and this use might well be connected with a passage on Archimedes in North’s translation of the Life of Marcellus.)

In Mind, vol. 47, there is an interesting discussion between A. E. Taylor and F. M. Cornford, in which the former (pp. 197 ff.) defends his view that Plato, when speaking of ‘the god...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• The Rise of Oracular Philosophy
• Marx’s Method
• Marx’s Prophecy
• Marx’s Ethics
• The Aftermath
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Addenda (1961, 1965)
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects