“Plato was an enemy of the open society.” (Popper) Comment. (2015, 20 Marks)
Karl Raimund Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in New Zealand exile during the Second World War. Its first volume, The Spell of Plato, opens a lineage of historicist enemies that runs on to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. The charge is that the Republic supplies the blueprint of a closed society. Popper is right about the logic of Plato’s premises and wrong about much of the history.
The Open and the Closed Society
- A closed society is tribal and magical: custom is felt to be as fixed as nature, and questioning it is sacrilege.
- An open society is one in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, institutions are treated as human conventions open to criticism, and rulers can be removed peacefully.
- Athenian democracy and Socrates’ questioning marked the breakthrough; Plato reacted against the strain of civilisation that openness brings.
The Indictment
- Historicism. Books VIII–IX of the Republic trace a law of decay: the best city sinks into timocracy, then oligarchy, then democracy, and finally tyranny. Since change is decline, the remedy is to freeze society in the image of its perfect Form. Popper condensed Plato’s demand as Arrest all political change!
- Holism and “justice”. Justice becomes each class keeping to its station, the individual existing for the city. Popper argues that the Republic attacks isonomy, equality before the law and the sense justice usually carried in Athens, without ever confronting it openly.
- Essentialism. The Theory of Forms places truth in essences grasped only by trained reason, so ordinary citizens cannot check what the philosopher claims to see.
- Utopian engineering. Remaking a city from a blueprint needs concentrated power and cannot correct its own mistakes.
- The noble lie (Popper’s “lordly lie”), censorship of poets and eugenic breeding of guardians make propaganda an instrument of rule.
- The leadership principle. The question who should rule? invites the answer “the best”, which yields unaccountable power. Popper replaces it: how can institutions be organised so that bad or incompetent rulers are prevented from doing too much damage?
His verdict: Plato’s programme, far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, is fundamentally identical with it. He adds that Plato betrayed Socrates, whose critical spirit was the open society’s founding faith. Gilbert Ryle agreed, calling Plato Socrates’ Judas.
The Case for the Defence
- Method. Ronald B. Levinson (In Defense of Plato, 1953) showed selective quotation and loaded translation. John Wild read Plato as a natural-law thinker who bound rulers to an objective standard, which makes him an ancestor of constitutionalism.
- Anachronism. Plato’s city has no nation, mass party, secret police or technology of surveillance. Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century creation.
- A city in speech. The Republic calls its city a pattern laid up in heaven, a measure for the soul rather than a manifesto. Its guardians own nothing.
- Self-correction. The Laws turns to written law, mixed government and accountable magistrates.
- Popper’s own concession. He admired Plato’s genius and targeted the authoritarian tendency of the argument.
The Indian Choice
The Constitution takes the Popperian answer: authority belongs to an office bounded by law, not to the wisdom of whoever holds it. The 1977 general election, which ended the Emergency by ballot, was the open society’s test in practice. The basic structure doctrine (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973) guards the conditions of criticism, not a single truth.
Conclusion
The charge overstates the history but lands on the logic. Grounding a claim to rule on knowledge that the ruled cannot audit is the permanent seed of closure. Plato is an enemy of the open society in his premises, not in his intentions, and the Laws shows he half-knew it.