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The first authoritarian: Karl Popper’s "theory" of Plato

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https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/politi...horitarian

EXCERPTS: . . . Today, The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps best remembered for two things: Karl Popper’s coinage of the terms “open society” and “closed society,” and his scorched-earth attack on Plato as the original architect of the latter. For Popper, Plato was the first and the most influential authoritarian thinker. (Popper’s analogous charges against Aristotle, Marx, and Hegel have not proven as memorable.)

Popper conceived of the difference between open and closed societies as a difference in their respective cultures of knowledge. Open societies were distinguished by their democratic culture of criticism, which made commonly held beliefs available for critique and revision, and in so doing, embraced innovation. Closed societies, by contrast, lacked this “critical attitude.” They were instead sustained by the “dogmatic” power of myths, which preserved existing power structures and stifled social change.

The assault on Plato took up the first of the book’s two volumes. Focusing on Plato’s Republic and its blueprint of a city ruled by a handful of elite philosophers, Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo.

All of this, Popper observed, amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship of philosopher-kings who peddled myths to their subjects in order to suppress free thinking and to lock them into a rigid caste system. The whole business of Plato’s politics boiled down to maintaining this scheme: an effort to “arrest all change.”

Plato’s vision, Popper went on to speculate, was a reaction to the burgeoning of democracy in the philosopher’s contemporary Athens. Traumatized by the trial and execution of his teacher, Socrates, at the hands of his fellow citizens, Plato became an avowed enemy of democracy. The Republic was the philosopher’s antidemocratic manifesto—and a statement of his own ambition to play the role of the philosopher-king.

Through the antidemocratic ideas articulated in the Republic, Popper argued, Plato irrevocably injected a mythic poison into the Western tradition. In the twentieth century, those ideas had found their incarnation in fascism. Popper wrote that the Noble Lie, the foundation myth of Plato’s Republic, was “an exact counterpart” to “the modern myth of Blood and Soil.”

[...] Classicists were immediately scandalized by Popper’s portrait of Plato. They took issue with the aggressiveness of the critique (“The author is, it would seem, constitutionally incapable of approaching Plato in an impartial, let alone a sympathetic, spirit”), his frank effort to shoehorn ancient material into modern categories (“He sees Plato all askew because he is always trying to squint round the corner in order to catch a glimpse of the figure of Hitler somewhere in the background”, and his speculation about Plato’s own political motives in penning the Republic (“deplorable”).

But these protestations were also drowned out by an unusual combination of popular approval and the endorsement of a few prominent philosophers from the circles Popper had succeeded, to a small degree, in penetrating. Gilbert Ryle, who had been appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford in 1945, wrote a glowing review in the journal Mind, disparaging the “addicts” of the Republic who were sure to resist the merits of Popper’s reading. Bertrand Russell, who had helped Popper get his job in New Zealand, wrote approvingly of Popper’s attack on Plato, being quick to note that he had himself had expressed similar misgivings. “That Plato’s Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people,” Russell wrote, “is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.”

Popper’s takedown of Plato evidently had struck a chord, particularly with his popular audience. Readers were tired of the stuffy, marble-bust Plato that scholars like Benjamin Jowett had idealized in Victorian England, and they took immediately to the revisionist notion that the lofty ideas they had been taught to admire were ultimately wrong, misguided, and even outright dangerous.

Popper was, of course, hardly the first to indulge in Plato bashing. [...] But something about Popper’s portrait resonated. It offered a refreshing simplicity and clarity of message in a time when, for once, nuance was not in high demand. Popper’s burn-down-the-house approach suited a public demand for explanations of how the atrocities of the Second World War could have happened at all. What had gone wrong?

[...] The remarkable story behind the book’s composition also fed the hype. The Open Society joined a pantheon of works by exiled Jewish thinkers offering sweeping accounts of the Western tradition. ... Through their personal suffering and their vast distance from their homes, these authors had, like seers, gained a special vantage point from which to contemplate the trajectory of Western civilization. Popper certainly encouraged the mythologizing.

Popper had intended The Open Society as an intervention in the politics of the midcentury. Somewhat unexpectedly, however, its readers also found in it a compass for navigating the emerging Cold War, and it was this that gave the book much of its enduring appeal. What had been written as an idiosyncratic polemic on the original sins of the Western tradition and the causes of the Second World War turned into something greater. For Marx, by way of Hegel, was the most recent false prophet to worship at the altar of Plato, and this intellectual lineage seemed to prescribe viewing the communist regimes of the postwar landscape with skepticism.

[...] Today, Popper’s totalitarian Plato exists in the popular imagination, uncomfortably and incongruously, alongside the more benevolent Plato he sought to overthrow. To a great degree, Plato continues to be celebrated as the founder of a rational intellectual tradition who wrested philosophy from the uncritical forces of myth and superstition...

[...] Classicists might insist, sniffily, that no one takes Popper’s Plato seriously these days. The fact remains, however, that The Open Society’s success has put them on the defensive for decades...

[...] If anything, the extremity of Popper’s position likely had the counterproductive effect of stifling any further, more nuanced scholarship exploring those dimensions of Plato’s politics: The totalitarian point had been made all too thoroughly already. Popper’s account continues to haunt the literature on Plato’s political philosophy—if only as a straw man to be dismissed in the introductory paragraphs of book chapters and journal articles

[...] Popper’s achievements were indeed substantial. He shocked the interpretation of Plato into contemporary relevance...

[...] But even if Popper had been earnest in his vision of an intellectual culture cured of its reverence for heroes, his project was ultimately incomplete, and, indeed, flawed from the outset.

For all of Popper’s purported efforts to topple Plato from his pedestal, he still accepted the premise [...] that Plato was the founding figure of the Western intellectual tradition. Popper urged his readers to be suspicious of the canon, but Plato’s place in it, whether as the inventor of an original good or an original evil, was left unquestioned.

It was an irony lost on few that his attack on Plato helped elevate Popper into the ranks of a contemporary canon. No doubt, there was no shortage of ways in which Popper failed to live up to the ideals of The Open Society. Colleagues often found him unpleasant and intolerant—hardly a model of the openness to criticism and alternate viewpoints he espoused. His students at the LSE jokingly referred to his book as “The Open Society and Its Enemies, written by one of its enemies.”

[...] Popper’s attachment to that deeper narrative perhaps prevented him from seeing both Plato and his myth making in a more nuanced light. ... More than three-quarters of a century after its publication, The Open Society is perhaps most illuminating today as a demonstration of both the seductiveness and the intractability of the neat origin stories that keep getting told about philosophy... (MORE - missing details)
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