The German Genius

Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, many of the arguments of the former title being included in The Open Society. 16
    The immediate spur to that book was the news of the Anschluss . The longer-term inspiration arose from the “pleasant sensation” Popper felt on arriving for the first time in England, “a country with old liberal traditions,” as compared with a country threatened with National Socialism, which for him was much more like the original closed society, the primitive tribe or feudal arrangement, where power and ideas are concentrated in the hands and minds of a few, or even one, the king or leader. Popper, like the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, was profoundly affected by the scientific method, which he extended to politics. For him, this meant that political solutions were like scientific ones—they “can never be more than provisional and are always open to improvement.” This is what he meant by the poverty of historicism, the search for deep lessons from a study of history, which would provide the “iron laws” by which society should be governed. Popper thought there was no such thing as history, only historical interpretation.
    This led Popper to the most famous passage in his book, the attack on Plato, Hegel, and Marx. (The book was originally called False Prophets: Plato, Hegel, Marx. ) Popper thought that Plato might well have been the greatest philosopher who ever lived but that he put the interests of the state above everything, including the interpretation of justice. Popper was attacked for his dismissal of Plato, but he clearly saw him as an opportunist and as the precursor of Hegel, whose dogmatic dialectical arguments had led, he felt, to an identification of the good with what prevails, and the conclusion that “might is right.” Popper thought this was simply a mischaracterization of dialectic. In reality, he said, it was merely a version of trial and error, as in the scientific method, and Hegel’s idea that thesis generates antithesis was wrong: thesis, he said, generates modifications as much as it generates the opposite to itself. 17 By the same token, Marx was a false prophet because he insisted on holistic change in society, which Popper thought had to be wrong simply because it was unscientific—it couldn’t be tested. He himself preferred piecemeal change, so that each new element introduced could be tested to see whether it was an improvement on the earlier arrangement. Popper was not against the aims of Marxism, pointing out, for example, that much of the program outlined in the Communist Manifesto had actually been achieved by Western societies. But that was his point: this had been achieved piecemeal, without violence.
    Popper shared with Hayek a belief that the state should be kept to a minimum, its basic raison d’être being to ensure justice, to ensure that the strong did not bully the weak. He disagreed with Mannheim, believing that planning would lead to more closure in society, simply because planning involved a historicist and holistic approach, which went against the scientific method of trial and error. This led Popper to consider democracy as the only viable possibility because it was the only form of government that embodied the scientific, trial-and-error method and allowed society to modify its politics in the light of experience, and to change government without bloodshed.
    The coincidence of these four books by Austro-Hungarian émigrés was remarkable but, on reflection, perhaps not so surprising. There was a war on that was being fought for ideas and ideals as much as for territory. These émigrés had each seen totalitarianism and dictatorship at close hand and realized that even when the war with Germany and Japan ended, the conflict with Stalinism would continue.
     
     
    Erwin Schrödinger, the physicist who conceived the idea that the electron orbited the nucleus as a wave (see Chapter 32) and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933, found a different way into the open. He left Germany in the year he won the Nobel, dismayed by the Nazis. He had been made a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught there before moving on to Ireland where, in 1943, he gave a series of well-received lectures, “What Is Life?” in which he considered how a physicist might define life. In these lectures he looked at the chromosome from the point of view of physics and showed that the gene must be “an aperiodic crystal…a