Karl Popper: Economic Interventionism.
Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and its
Enemies’ was one of the only classics of political philosophy contemporary of
the Second World War.
Popper believed that if any political
organisation was to flourish, then its institutions must be open to
self-correction. This view is a political adaptation of his scientific theory,
as Popper thought that all political institutions progressed through the
shedding of obsolete hypotheses. Popper saw political policies as experiments
that must be open to analysis and discontinued should they be falsified. This
is the application of his falsification principle.
The Falsification Principle: Similar to the
views of the Logical Positivists, Popper seeks to define between falsifiable
statements and metaphysical statements. A falsifiable statement is one that can
be proven false through the analysis of empirical data, yet the falsification
principle allows improvements in our ability to measure empirical data to
improve the accuracy of the falsifiable data. This challenges the verification
principle of the Logical Positivist movement, which sought to create an un-falsifiable
truth from the analysis of empirical data.
Popper’s application of this theory allowed
him to define two key features of an Open Society:
-
The ruled within the society
must always be allowed the freedom to discuss and criticise policies proposed
by the government.
-
It should always be possible to
remove the current rulers without the use of violence.
It’s important to note the historical
context of this theory, as it is the opposite extreme to the contemporary
governments of wartime Germany, Italy and Russia.
Popper seems to take a middle ground between
the unrestrained Capitalism of the US and the total control of Communist and
Fascist government. Popper felt that unrestrained Capitalism would create
inequality and that it is the job of the government to protect the economically
weak from the economically strong, maintaining the status quo.
Popper vs. Marx:
Popper saw Karl Marx as a threat to the
Open Society due to his views on the future of humanities existence. Marx
believed that by analysing the past and finding a pattern or rhythm, one could
predict the future. However, Popper rejected this view in ‘The Poverty of
Historicism’ (1957), where he argued, from a technologically determinist
viewpoint, that humanity advances through the progress of scientific discovery,
so in order to predict the future , one must already know what is yet to be
discovered, which is impossible by definition.
In this sense, Popper rejected empiricism
as a source of truth, in fact, Popper went as far as to reject any theory of
finding an absolute truth. That is to say – Popper believed that it was key to
see things within their historical context and comprehend that they will
eventually be seen in the same way that contemporarily falsified theories will
be. So we should consider any theory as incomplete and also consider that it
may, and most probably will, be proven false. Hence why rulers should be easily
removable.
