After having it sit on my book shelf collecting dust for half a decade or more, I finally picked up Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” as I had nothing left that was less daunting in appearance for my late afternoon lunch/dinner/coffee break. Whatever else I may get from it, whether I find myself agreeing or not, I most certainly found it a generator of ideas and flights of wild fancy, some of which I will now impose upon you.
First, I have only ever read parts of Plato. A few chapters here and there over the years. I have tended to use my deep thinking reading time for people more like Hayek and the other free market economists and thinkers. Thus I was utterly and totally unprepared for the shock of the Platonic quotation that headed Volume I:
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”
I do not think I have ever had such a horrified awakening to such pure evil in my life. If this is what Plato’s philosophy espouses, then nearly anything built upon him is likely to be totalitarian and I can easily see the direct line from him through the Hitler’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s of well over two thousand years after his demise.
You might want to read the section on Plato’s ethics and Politics in the Reublic(Link) at Stanford. The author’s sympathies seem pretty clear, but it is a decent read.
However, keep in mind that The Republic is an early dialogue. Many think Plato changed his political views over time i.e. The Laws(Link)
The Republic is the best known and most influential, but it may not represent the views of the mature Plato
While Plato’s political views may have matured, the fact that he once thought everyone should “follow the leader” makes me wary of anything he has to say on the subject.
You have obviously never studied Republic. It reads like a fascist’s template.
Idealism and Utopianism are certainly connected in the sense that they appeal to the same mindset.
I stumbled into a long, drawn out argument in college with a philosophy professor, who was a utilitarian by way of idealism, when we were discussing Plato. I remarked that the idealist position made little sense unless one believed in re-incarnation, which Plato did.
Well, apparently, in philosophical terms I had called his mother something very very rude by implying that idealism was actually spiritually inspired hocum instead of the big deal philosophical school that it was trotted out to be.
He didn’t care much for my opinion of utilitariansim, either.
As far as the politics is concerned, recall that Plato believed the best form of government was authoritarian rule by philosopher-kings.
Can’t imagine who he had in mind for the lead role in that little drama.
Yes, Plato is old news, as it were. What is very interesting to me – and maybe someone here will be kind enough to enlighten me – is Aristotle, who was Plato’s disciple, but, IIUC, had a diametrically opposing set of values. What exactly happened there?
Oh, dear.
It would have been worth looking up the quote in context. The start of the first sentence has been ‘trimmed’.
“Now for expeditions of war much consideration and many laws are required; the greatest principle of all is that no one of either sex should be without a commander…”
In a society that is surrounded by unfriendly neighbours and in an almost perpetual state of war, military discipline is prized. It’s descriptive of how army recruits are trained even today. How much more so for a society on the bleeding edge of civilisation? It is a reminder, I hope, of how much we have gained through the martial achievements of our civilisation, that we no longer have to live so.
The other thing to remember when reading any old philosophy is that many things are obvious to us because they were invented a few hundred years ago. We forget – they had to be invented, and their invention was a great event. To expect Plato to espouse modern values of liberty and autonomy is asking a bit much, even for him. It was built gradually, one tiny step at a time. Looking back at how even the greatest thinker of his time now looks crude and primitive to us just goes to show the sheer magnitude and brilliance of humanity’s achievement.
I’m sometimes amused by historical fiction, in which the hero is given totally anachronistic modern values and behaviour. (Like believing in sexual equality, etc.) Of course, modern people would naturally find it hard to sympathise with a more accurate portrayal, but still. It distorts our perception.
Where I would take issue is that others of the rough time period thought differently. Pericles was much more for an open society, and from my readings of history, Athens was not a society in which individuals were like those of the Socrates quote. If that view represented anyone, it was Sparta, not Athens.
I would further note that in the context of Popper it seems the quote is meant to point out that many philosophers and leaders of the 20th century did indeed take those sorts of thoughts as read and believed them fervently.
If we know better now (I hope) it is because those ideas killed a hundred million in the last century.
Dale, a minor quibble- the man’s name is Karl, not Carl. Doubtlessly the link with Mr. Marx causes this name-avoidance, but you must overcome it.
Alisa, if you literally Google ‘Aristotle on slavery’, you will come to another eyeful of direct quotes. He was not so far off Plato as you might have heard. His differences have probably been blown out of all proportion- on most points he might have agreed!
You talking to me? All I said was Plato’s views changed over time, is that false? How would I have known that if I hadn’t read both The Republic and The Laws? I didn’t say a damn thing in defense of The Republic.
It’s a useful reminder that, distasteful as it may be, there is nothing inherently alien to the Western political tradition about totalitarianism. As someone mentioned above, reading the Republic in college was a bit of a ‘light-bulb’ moment for me.
Q. How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Why do they need lightbulbs? They’ve got The Enlightenment!
I have not dug out my copy of this part of Popper’s work (Pt II is Hegel & Marx, as I recall).
But, I think Popper prefaced his remarks on Plato’s views with background on the disasters and decline of of the then society.
As for Aristotle’s differentiations, keep in mind that he was a Macedonian, not an Athenian (Plato’s “curse” being the decline and disorders of Athens, the loss of commonality) where Aristotle was an outsider.
Such differentiations were far more significant in those times (See, Chap 12, After Virtue by MacIntyre).
Nuke Gray –
May I recommend a read of Isaiah Berlin’s short Essay: Philosophy and Government Repression, found most recently in The Sense of Reality
ISBN 0-374-26092-3 (1997).
Perhaps you are not aware of the Scottish Enlightenment, or of the Counter Enlightenment (also the subject of a Berlin essay).
And, NO, I am not a “philosopher” in the academic use of that term.
Dear RRS,
if you can’t make up better jokes yourself, don’t complain!
“What is very interesting to me – and maybe someone here will be kind enough to enlighten me – is Aristotle, who was Plato’s disciple, but, IIUC, had a diametrically opposing set of values. What exactly happened there?”
Well for one thing their metaphysics were different Alisa…
If Plato’s personality was as fascist as his writings, I’ll bet it was his female friends who invented ‘Platonic friendship!’
Before making any such judgment, I want the specific source of the quote. Which work, which page/line. I want to know whose translation is quoted. Is it from the Republic? It’s not from Jowett’s translation, which was the only one I can find on the web (in literally dozens of sites).
I’ve seen (for instance) Mark Twain “quoted” by anti-semites who pick phrases out of context, and even skip words that would spoil their construction.
I also want to know the context. Is the quote a statement in dialogue which is immediately refuted by the author’s stand-in? Has it been trimmed in some critical way? Pa Annoyed states that there is a prefacing phrase which applies the statement to discipline in a military force. If so,
then in omitting that phrase and pretending that the statement is intended to apply to ordinary civil society, Popper was profoundly dishonest.
Indeed, the mere fact that he left out any information as to where this quote appeared is suspicious.
“If we know better now (I hope) it is because those ideas killed a hundred million in the last century.”
Dale, the next time I fail to be impressed by a horror movie, I’ll just come back to this comment thread and read that sentence. Just once.
Look man: if “we” only know the consequences of such ideas because they were actually tried (which quite likely resulted in more than a hundred million 20th C deaths by the way), rather than because they were recognized in thoughtful reflection, then that does not provide a basis for hope – but only terror.
On the actual quotation which Popper draws from Plato, it occurs, as Dale says, at the header to Volume 1 but it does not occur alone. Above it, Popper quotes Pericles:
“Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.”
Popper prefaces the Pericles quote with “for the open society”, but prefaces the Plato quote with “against the open society”. Popper’s book was first published in 1945. I think he can and should be forgiven for emphasizing the historical parallels, but besides that, I also think the charge of dishonesty is false.
One of the points Popper goes on to draw in Volume 1 is that the entire organization of Spartan society, which he alleges was Plato’s inspiration for The Republic, was based on a collectivist outlook in which the freedom of the individual was suppressed in order to preserve the form of Sparta itself and inure that society against change as far as possible. Popper’s charge is that that is the very reason why Sparta was in a state of almost perpetual war; to resist change, the Spartans had to isolate themselves from trade and migration with the other city-states and to be constantly suspicious of them, constantly in a state of war-preparedness.
Enjoy the book Dale, it is a long time since I read it and I still occasionally give it a bit of eye when I’m putting something else back on the shelf. There is a lot of interesting stuff in his chapter notations and there is a lot which I’ve surely forgotten now.
As I recall, there’s a chapter on Plato and Fascism at the end of Richard Crossman’s book on Plato. But if you look it up, read also Ralph Glasser’s hostile account of Crossman teaching, in Gorbals Boy at Oxford.
The quote to which the OP refers, can be further investigated by looking at notes 33 and 34 to chapter 6: ”Totalitarian Justice.”
From there you have links to both the Laws and Republic. Search ”Plato, Laws, 942a” for example.
Mike: yes, but my question was what caused that difference.
RRS: thank you, that sounds like a good place to start.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this “background” is in the consideration of how ideas, human thoughts (and manners of thinking) move from mind to mind, over time and circumstance, reforming in differentiated environments; and are so often subsumed into “new” conditions without analysis or even review of their origins and modifications.
I know Alisa, and I gave you an answer – their different views on metaphysics. If that answer disappoints then perhaps you could spell out more clearly what you mean when you say “values”, or show me what is wrong with it…
In the meantime, here’s a brief sketch, because I’m about to jump on my bike…
Plato’s political program – as characterized by Popper (and others) – was totalitarian. That was his expression of his political values. Where did he get those values? From his metaphysics*. Which were? Which start with his solution to the problem of universals – that there existed “Ideal Forms” of which the particular instances we apprehend are mere derivative copies. The metaphysics continues with the assertion that change is essentially degeneration from an ideal state of rest. Plato wanted to arrest this process of “degeneration” from the ideal, and this led to his totalitarian design, which he saw partly implemented in Sparta.
*I’m ignoring psychological causes here (I’ve got to go).
Mike, what I am interested is how different people get to adopt their ‘metaphysics’ (and yes, that includes psychological causes to a very large extent). This case is of particular interest, as one of them was the student of another. I do like the way RRS has put it.
The `Republic’ is actually entitled the `Polity’, i.e. `The State.’
It is not, in other words, about republicanism at all, but about how a Guardian class should take complete and total control of the rest of the populace.
I thought that Plato’s anti-democratic views were well-known, I’m surprised that anyone is surprised with them…
Athenian Democracy did not depend on its philosophers; it evolved according to circumstance, and if it had been up to Plato and other philosophers, i wouldn’t haven existed at all.
Dale, if the 1000 or so densely written pages of the Open Society and it’s Enemies is the least daunting option on your shelves what else is there! Or is there nothing else?
“Mike, what I am interested is how different people get to adopt their ‘metaphysics’ (and yes, that includes psychological causes to a very large extent). This case is of particular interest, as one of them was the student of another. I do like the way RRS has put it.”
I see – beg your pardon, Alisa. There is the likely influence of historical circumstances and psychology to be taken into consideration in terms of which concerns motivated them and why, yet I think it’s fair to say that Aristotle largely arrived at his metaphysics by thinking about the questions and actually trying to find the correct answers quite irrespective of political conditions.
“The `Republic’ is actually entitled the `Polity’, i.e. `The State.’ … It is not, in other words, about republicanism at all, but about how a Guardian class should take complete and total control of the rest of the populace.”
True and surely it is a measure of Plato’s reach that Guardian-readers have achieved that in today’s Britain – thousands of years after he was writing!
“Athenian Democracy did not depend on its philosophers…”
I’m not sure about that… Protagoras, Herodotus, Democritus, Antisthenes, Pericles. You might say that none of these men were “philosophers”, but they certainly held philosophical views which had some influence in Athens (e.g. the anti-slavery cause, democracy, equality before the law and so on) and for which they were relatively well known.
Surely Plato had done the same?
Lorenzo: Looking around the room, some of the reading on my stack right now are: Anderson’s “Fundamentals of Aerodynamics”; Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science”; “Planning and Design of Airports”… yeah, I think I took the lazy choice for lunch time reading for the next couple months… :-^
Plato often reminds me of many Western left-wing intellectuals during the 20th- living in a comparatively free society, they despised that freedom and instead glorified a totalitarian foreign power. It is of course anachronistic to blame Plato for not being a champion of the rights of man in an era where nobody was, but Plato was authoritarian even by the standards of his own culture.
Oops. First sentence should have have gone, “during the 20th Century.”
Your report is very interesting indeed.
I invite You to see a great collection of views of political borders in my Italian-Estonian site http://www.pillandia.blogspot.com
Best wishes from Italy!
“Surely Plato had done the same?”
Very probably yes.
The (very roughly-stated here) Objectivist contention that the basic conflict of the modern world can be plotted as Aristotle vs. Plato is largely correct.
According to this essay on Mises.org The Decline of the Rule of Law(Link), Hayek suggests, perhaps in mitigation, that Plato was living and writing at a time when democracy was in pretty poor shape:
Marc:
If it was meant as mitigation, it doesn’t seem to work: what if a contemporary Plato spoke the same words today, when the shape of democracy seems to be very similar? The only mitigating factor I can think of is the one suggested by Dale, i.e. our own experience of millions dying unnatural and often grisly death at the whim of various ‘leaders’, while Plato had no, benefit (for lack of a more suitable word) of such experience.
Nuke, slavery is rather tricky in this context.
More Plato bashing over at Mises.org.(Link) Down-with-Pla-to, down-with-Pla-to, yay!
Ahem. Time to take my pills, I think.
Having got over my shock that Dale has never read Plato – “how much hard science have you read Paul” (good point – none at all, at least not since school) I will add something to this.
“The Laws” is also totalitarian.
Gold and silver coin is outlawed – all money must be fiat from the state. No one is allowed to leave without permission – and then only for missions to spy on inventions in other lands (even Plato somehow knows that his nightmare will not have many inventions in it – so it must keep a watch and take ideas from outside).
And so on and so forth.
So saying “well Plato was not so bad he wrote The Laws” will not work because The Laws is evil as well.
That leaves the Alan Bloom defence (known for his big translation of the Republic – or rather for the massive “afterward” the work contains, as the translation is not much different from the Lindsey “Everyman” translation).
This defence is basically “Plato meant all this as a warning….”
As I can not read Ancient Greek I can not refute the position of the late Bloom.
However, I would point out that no one in the Ancient world (as far I know) read Plato that way.
Perhaps they were all wrong – but the held him to be writing about what he wanted, not warning ironically about stuff he held to be terrible.
Perhaps in a couple of thousand years people will argue that the writings of Karl Marx were really warnings against socialism.
I’m no particular fan of Plato, indeed I think he’s wrong on most of the things I care about, but “Open Society” is tacky hatchet job fit for first year undergraduates nonetheless and you don’t need ancient Greek to know that, only access to a few Penguin editions.
In this quote Plato takes an observation of what is appropriate behaviour in a military situation, over the course of his work he argues through this and other analogies the proper way to subject the body and desires to the rational soul, properly trained by and focused on rational apprehension of the Good.
Now, that’s my understanding of Plato and I disagree with him for various reasons, but perhaps I’m completely mis-representing him – and how would you know?
Every man living in the West with a pretension to being educated should be familiar with Plato, the same is not true of Popper.
And the Republic is not primarily a template for a just society, but a way of explaining what a just man is by a process of complex (and often tedious) allegory. Along the way he deals with a number of other issues from metaphysics to literary interpretation. It’s not Plato’s most acccomplished work, philosophically or literaririly and is only so widely read because it covers more areas of “Platonic” thought than any other dialogue.
However, it really won’t do just to say “Plato wanted to ban flutes … what a shit!”
Alisa, it’s really simple. Plato advocated that we all be slaves of the city/state. Aristotle felt that barbarians (non-Greeks) were natural slaves. As a woman and a foreigner, you would have been screwed.
In mitigation, I read that Plato was a disciple of Socrates, and saw what ‘Democracy’ did to his beloved teacher, and so concluded, “Democracy- you can have it! I’ll look for a better system!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Its
The quote from Laws 942a through 942d:
“[942a] Military organization is the subject of much consultation and of many appropriate laws. The main principle is this–that nobody, male or female, should ever be left without control, nor should anyone, whether at work or in play, grow habituated in mind to acting alone and on his own initiative, but he should live always, both in war [942b] and peace, with his eyes fixed constantly on his commander and following his lead; and he should be guided by him even in the smallest detail of his actions–for example, to stand at the word of command, and to march, and to exercise, to wash and eat, to wake up at night for sentry-duty and dispatch-carrying, and in moments of danger to wait for the commander’s signal before either pursuing or retreating before an enemy; and, in a word, [942c] he must instruct his soul by habituation to avoid all thought or idea of doing anything at all apart from the rest of his company, so that the life of all shall be lived en masse and in common; for there is not, nor ever will be, any rule superior to this or better and more effective in ensuring safety and victory in war. This task of ruling, and being ruled by, others must be practiced in peace from earliest childhood; but anarchy [942d] must be utterly removed from the lives of all mankind.“
I emphasized the beginning and end of the passage to make clear that although Plato’s principle of ruling and being ruled begins in a military context, it extends far beyond that. To claim that Popper twisted the Plato quote out of context is an exaggeration.
“However, it really won’t do just to say “Plato wanted to ban flutes … what a shit!”
That won’t even pass as hyperbolic exaggeration – go pour yourself a drink man and calm down.
Nuke, the complexity of the issue of opposition to slavery lies in the fact that it is not as instinctive as the mere love of freedom, since it has an additional component: the notion that all men are created equal. That notion is not instinctive: it has to be arrived at by reflection and logical reasoning, things that take time (and indeed took a very long time, if we are to believe history). Apparently, Aristotle simply hasn’t gotten there yet, while the problem with his teacher is that the mere instinctive love of freedom seems to have been completely foreign to him.
I think that passes perfectly well as hyperbolic exaggeration of Popper’s hermeneutical approach to Plato. It’s (happy Thomas?) an entertaining way of reading, to be sure, even more so when he moves on to Hegel, but in the end, I think, unsatisfactory and, worse, actually dangerous.
It’s very easy for the modern mind to dismiss the intense obsession with virtue in the classics as either laughable or one short step away from Fascism and this attitude not only makes earnest engagement with the Hellenes difficult, but largely precludes the possiblity of seriously thinking our way to an alternative. Now, I’d take Jerusalem over Athens any day of the week and, coming from a somewhat different tradition, I’m less reliant on the latter, but it doesn’t take a very perceptive observer to walk around a campus or quad for a few days and realise that Harold Bloom was stunningly, suicide-inducingly, correct.
And there’s another point. Even if we say that Plato was the model for Mao (and all the evidence suggests that both Republic and The Laws were not read as political blueprints either in the ancient world or through most of the history of their reception), it certainly isn’t the blueprint for where we live. New Labour, Obama, the masters of the EU, the whole enemy class are not Collectivists, at least not in the Popperian sense of the term. They are “pragmatic” or “empirical” reformers in precisely the sense Popper was and it is Popperian social reform that has landed us in the mess we are now in. Do you think Ed Balls gets his inspiration from Plato? Really? Or will you recognise that if he and his vulgar crew had ever sat down seriously to read and think about what the ghosts of our civilization had to say about the good for man and the state we might be in an ever so slightly better situation?
Popper did not only give to us George Soros’ bloody “Institute”, he did not only help create the world where we experiment with a million tax credits and public options and public-private-partnerships till we’re bankrupt and blue in the face, he did something far worse. He helped ensure tha millions of young men and women will never know the mental liberation that comes from reading in a dead tongue, dead men thinking passionately, exhilaratingly and, yes, wrongly about matters transcendent, so utterly alien but immediate and powerful at the same time. So they will never escape the tyranny of an endless present, locked into a life of meaningless pleasure and even more meaningless politics. As we slide inexorably into Brave New World minus the cool techno stuff – that is to say tyranny + libertinism + Keynesian economics – Popper must take a geat share of the blame and Plato can take none. In as much as he still has any impact, it is to retard the process of our neo-enserfment, but it’s slight and fading even as we speak.
* Obviously I meant Allan Bloom
Nothing could be further from the truth. Popper is The explanation of The Scientific Method upon which the very existence of modern western civilisation is perched and through which all critically rational enquiry is conducted. The fact he was politically naive and frankly rather unpleasant personally is irrelevant.
My main problem with “The Open Society and its Enemies” is that (unlike in “The Poverty of Historicism”) Popper keeps going on about how Plato and co are “conservatives” – that made no sense to me even as a boy (as Plato was not arguing to preserve the society he lived in, or arguing for going back to the way things had been – no, he as arguing for a society that existed only in his head, which is hardly “conservative”).
However, then I read Karl Popper’s explanation – “The Open Society and its Enemies” was his “war work” he was trying to keep moderate leftists (social democrats) on side, and he choose to do that by down playing the leftist, socialist and revolutionary aspects of people like Plato (and the Nazis) and stressing their “conservatism” instead.
Of course one can find conservative elements in most things (if one looks hard enough) – even the Soviet Union made a big thing of traditional Russian culture and therefore could be described as “culturally conservative” (but it certainly was not conservative in any political sense).
However, such “war work” by Karl Popper does seem to have put George Soros very much on the wrong track.
Popper would have been horrified and disgusted by Soros – I know enough about Popper to be certain of that. But he must share a bit of the blame for him – for example helping reinforce the idea in the brain of Soros that conservative = bad guy and that any chage is good by definition (NEITHER OF THESE OPINIONS WAS HELD BY POPPER – BUT A MISREADING OF THE OPEN SOCIETY CAN GIVE RISE TO THEM).
Plato’s Republic not really about a new state – and neither was The Laws I suppose.
O.K. – I can not get Plato on the line to find out what he was really about. All I know is that he starts by misleading people about “justice” (with a few simple tricks like saying “would you give an axe back to man who had gone mad and was going to use it to attack people – you would not, well then justice can not be about giving what is owned so……”) he twists the traditional private property upholding definitions of justice (in order to make them seem silly) and puts defences of these (made silly) definitions into the mouths of people he presents as idiots – who are soon won over by the genius “Socrates” (really Plato himself of course – as there is no evidence that the real Socrates held these opinions).
Plato himself is not a reliable witness – as, for example, his famous account of the death of Socrates (in another work) has the man showing wildly different symptoms from what symptoms a man killed with hemlock would show.
You do not quietly chat with your friends, till your limbs gradually go a bit numb, after drinking that stuff – because you are too busy thrashing round on the floor vomiting.
“Paul you have missed the philosophical point”.
No doubt I have – but I do know that if a man gives me a detailed account of a conversation that I know can not have taken place (because the main person in the conversation would have been unable to speak at the time) I do not believe any other “noble lies” he tells me.
For example, we know (from various sources) that the real Socrates was interested in scientific experiments (the playwrights had all sorts of fun with Socrates coming in covered in bits of stuff) – but the Socrates of Plato has nothing but contempt for experiments.
Still I think we can agree that Everyman translations are better than Penquin ones – the introductions are better for a start.
Still I agree that Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” is a very good book. In spite of my not agreeing with what he says in the Afterwards of his translation Plato’s Republic.
Although Bloom had a reply to people like me.
Buy the Lindsey Everyman translation – it is much the same as my translation (although some years before) and does not have the interpretation that irritates you.
Besides it is cheaper.
That is (if my memory serves) from the introduction to Bloom’s own translation – and made me warm to the man.
“New Labour, Obama, the masters of the EU, the whole enemy class are not Collectivists, at least not in the Popperian sense of the term. They are “pragmatic” or “empirical” reformers in precisely the sense Popper was and it is Popperian social reform that has landed us in the mess we are now in.”
They are pragmatists for sure, and I will quite readily admit that one of the faults with Popper’s book is that he sides with democratic social engineering over totalitarian social engineering, as if no other alternatives were worthy of consideration. Yet the likes of Balls and Obama are collectivists too, since the basic principle underpinning their policies is that the State may quite rightly trample all over the liberty of the individual.
It is possible to have a fundamentally (even fundamentalistly) individualist political ethics and still believe that individuals have no or few rights which the State cannot infringe [e.g. Hobbes], or that there are other rights (healthcare, education, security etc.) that can in some or many circumstances override others (property, liberty etc.) [Rawlsian liberalism]. New Labour, it seems to me, embrace a strict individualist (and relativist) account of the human good, but don’t think there is any necessary connnection between that and liberty.
And they’re right because there is no necessary connection between individualism and political, or other forms of, liberty.
To approach the question from another direction, what is the collective in New Labour’s “thought”? The People, the working class, the ummah, the nation, what? No, just like Popper, if you put it to Harriet Harman who she was working for she’d say many individuals against few individuals.
Just because Collectivism is evil (I don’t believe that this is a meaningful term to apply to anyone before Rousseau by the way, so while Platonic thought did influence Collectivism, I wouldn’t call him a Collectivist) does not mean that there aren’t things other than Collectivism which are also evil. Know thy enemy, for it is not Collectivism, at least not now.
I think that Gabriel has a point: some people enjoy exercising power over others, while not necessarily viewing those others as a collective instead of individuals. Problem is, the only way they can actually exercise that power is by treating those others as a collective, or as various collectives. So it may be the case that collectivism is the ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ when evil is concerned.
The key to unlocking the conundrum that Gabriel talks about is to recognise that individualism, properly understood, must embrace the non-initiation of force principle and property rights as an extension of the principle of self ownership. If it doesn’t, it is merely libertinism, a sort of amoral desire for something and damn everyone else. That is not liberalism, and it is not sustainable.
Yet NuLab treats property with scorn and does not regard the individual as having the right over their own bodies: consider its endless obsession with issues like smoking, diet, etc.
On this, at least, I suspect Gabriel would agree with me.
Remember Phaedo is a play about the death of Socrates, a dramatization.
Given that Socrates has just explained the immortality of the soul isn’t the slow paralysis that Plato describes apt?
A large number of people around at the time would have known what happened when a person drank the poison used for executions. Dramatizing it, or not doing so, would have been perfectly acceptable. (Just as if a TV show depicted the death of Elvis by him being taken by aliens they wouldn’t be really be lying.)
(By the way it’s not certain that Plato did dramatize it, see http://www.nd.edu/~plato/bloch.htm )
The fact he was politically naive and frankly rather unpleasant personally is irrelevant.
Hi Perry – Popper supported piecemeal change rather than wholesale revolution, he thought that we should try to improve on the best of our existing traditions, and he thought that “who should rule?” is a misbegotten question. How is this politically naive? It seems to me that he made important contributions to political philosophy. As for his unpleasantness, there are conflicting accounts. See, for example,
http://curi.us/1311-popper-meek-or-angry
“It is possible to have a fundamentally (even fundamentalistly) individualist political ethics and still believe that individuals have no or few rights which the State cannot infringe [e.g. Hobbes]…. New Labour, it seems to me, embrace a strict individualist (and relativist) account of the human good, but don’t think there is any necessary connnection between that and liberty.”
Their collectivism lies in their principles (i.e. their method – democratic socialism, or as Billy Beck calls it ‘the cannibal pot’) not their purported aims.
“So it may be the case that collectivism is the ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ when evil is concerned.”
Spot on, Alisa.
“Hi Perry – Popper supported piecemeal change rather than wholesale revolution, he thought that we should try to improve on the best of our existing traditions, and he thought that “who should rule?” is a misbegotten question. How is this politically naive?”
Perry can speak for himself, but I can field that question for you if you like… Popper was politically naive because he neglected to consider just what sort of change could be wrought over time by the piecemeal reforms of a democratic legislature. See for example Roosevelt’s new deal, which was implemented before Popper’s book was published.
I’m sure there are many alternative definitions of Collectivism into which New Labour would fit (though given that they probably include everyone except you, Billy Beck and that smelly guy with a beard who raved at me last time I was on the tube, I’m a little unpersuaded of their analytical value). Nevertheless, New Labour* are not Collectivists according to the definition set out, at some length, by Popper and, indeed, espuse a brand of politics specifically recommended in some of Popper’s works as an alternative to Collectivism.
Given that New Labour have destroyed this country, this seems to me of some imprtance when assessing the relevance of Popper’s thought to our present age.
Yes, New Labour are scum, I’d have ’em all flogged.
*I’d also note that, though the Fabians obviously were, many strands of Old Labour were not really Collectivist either, perhaps even less so in some ways than New Labour.
Thank you for allowing that comment through – whoever (Perry, Dale?) was manning the spambot filter. I would like to edit this though:
“Their collectivism lies in their principles (i.e. their method – democratic socialism, or as Billy Beck calls it ‘the cannibal pot’) not their purported aims.”
What I ought to have said is that the collectivism of people like Obama lies in the fact that their method contradicts their purported aims (to the extent those aims can even be called “individualist”).
Mind you, it might be too late now for anyone to take any notice!
The filter just filtered out a comment in which I thanked the editor for allowing my previous comment through the filter. It’s after 5am and I’ve had a drink tonight, so if nobody else finds that amusing, well whatever… it tickled me.
Yeah, the bot is laughing its ass off:-)
Very droll, Alisa. 😛