Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 305

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY This, of course, means that the principle of non-intervention, of an unrestrained economic system, has to be given up; if we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state We must demand that unrestrained capitalism give way to an economic interventionism (OSE ii 125) Unlimited economic freedom was in any case a contradiction in terms: unlimited freedom of the labour market could not be combined with unlimited freedom of workers to unite In the two volumes of his book Popper attacked two philosophers whom he saw as enemies of the open society: Plato and Marx His detailed critique of some Platonic political institutions was perhaps no more than a useful corrective to the fatuous admiration for the Republic that had been fashionable in British universities since the time of Benjamin Jowett The critique of Marx, however, was something much more effective and influential Popper’s principal target was Marx’s belief that he had discovered scientific laws that determined the future of the human race, tendencies that worked with iron necessity towards inevitable results Popper showed how the course of history since Capital had in fact falsified many of Marx’s specific would-be scientific predictions Marx’s determinism was only one example of a more general error that Popper pilloried in a later book, The Poverty of Historicism (1957): ‘I mean by ‘‘historicism’’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘‘rhythms’’ or the ‘‘patterns’’, the ‘‘laws’’ or the ‘‘trends’’ that underlie the evolution of history.’ Besides Marxism, early Christian belief in an imminent Second Coming, and Enlightenment belief in the inevitability of human progress, offer examples of historicism All forms of historicism, Popper showed, can be refuted by a single argument What form the future will take will depend, inter alia, on what form scientific progress will take If, therefore, we are to predict the future of society we must predict the future of science But it is logically impossible to predict the nature of a scientific discovery; to so would entail actually making the discovery Hence, historicism is impossible, and the only meaning we can find in history, past or future, is that given it by free, contingent, unpredictable human choices The most sustained attempt to set out a systematic theoretical structure for the type of liberal democracy aspired to by most Western states was 288