Karl Popper

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.