Valuing Diversity Without Illusions: The Anti-Utopian Agonism of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies

ABSTRACT

This article offers a novel interpretation of Karl Popper’s influential yet controversial book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper, it argues, sheds light on a pivotal social and political question: How can we value genuine human plurality without succumbing to the illusion that enmity can be removed from the socio-political realm? What we find in Popper, I argue, is an “anti-utopian agonism,” that is, his conception of an open society harbors significant agonistic elements—a commitment to human plurality, an endorsement of (some) social and political struggles, and an acute awareness of the tragic dimensions of political life. Simultaneously, Popper’s distinctive anti-utopianism makes an important contribution to agonistic theory on two fronts. First, his concept of “the strain of civilization” reveals a deeper notion of tragedy, which gives him the edge over the rather shallow notion of tragedy we find in the agonistic tradition. Secondly, he develops a tripartite notion of enmity, which is theoretically interesting and practically relevant. The aim of this article is not only to contribute to the scholarship on Popper and agonism but, first and foremost, to demonstrate how The Open Society still matters as an inspiring work that illuminates the practically relevant question of how to value diversity without illusions.

KEYWORDS:

• Karl Popper
• The Open Society and Its Enemies
• democratic theory
• anti-utopian agonism
• enmity

Acknowledgments

Two anonymous reviewers helped to improve this paper (the usual disclaimer applies, of course). The article was written during my time at the Open Society Research Platform at Central European University. I am grateful to the Open Society University Network for funding the project and to my colleagues at CEU, Olga Biziukova, Sasha Shtokvych, Maja Skalar, and Liviu Matei, for contributing to the project in various ways. The participants of our academic events have helped me clarify my own thinking on the open society. Finally, I have benefitted enormously from conversations with Sam Hall and Silviu Craciunas on the tennis court and in Viennese (chess) bars over the last two years. May my attempt to reinterpret Karl Popper be more successful than my attempts to relaunch my tennis and chess career.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Emberley, and Cooper, Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 69. Throughout his career, Voegelin’s conception of the open society was inspired by Henri Bergson who introduced the concept to philosophy in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion in 1932. Voegelin writes that “the history of mankind … is an open society—Bergson’s, not Popper’s—comprehending both truth and untruth in tension” (quoted in Embry and Hughes, The Eric Voegelin Reader, 169).

^2. Emberley, and Cooper, Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 66–67.

^3. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Hereafter all page references are to the 2020 edition. Before one feels too sorry for him, note that Popper was no slouch at scolding colleagues either. In one letter to Raymond Aron he writes: “When I read either Adorno or Habermas, I feel as if lunatics were speaking. I have translated some of their German sentences into simple German. It turns out to be either trivial or tautological or sheer pretentious nonsense. I completely fail to see why Habermas is reputed to have ‘talent’” (quoted in https://www.stephenhicks.org/2021/09/30/popper-to-aron-letter-on-adorno-and-habermas/).

^4. For a comparison of Rawls and Popper, see Boyer, “Is an Open Society a Just Society?” The parallels between Shklar and Popper are striking, yet Shklar only wrote a (highly critical) essay on Bergson (reprinted in Political Thought and Political Thinkers) and never engaged with Popper. There are no references in Arendt’s work to Popper (and vice versa), and there is no relevant secondary literature comparing the two thinkers.

^5. See, for example, Pickel, “Never Ask Who Should Rule,” or Eidlin, “Popper and Democratic Theory.”

^6. In The Guardian Robert McCrum, for instance, ranks The Open Society as the 35th best nonfiction book of all time.

^7. Rod Thomas writes that one of his articles was rejected as one reviewer asserted that Popper’s ideas about democracy and the open society are “now largely ignored by political philosophers, social theorists, and historians,” which renders his analysis redundant. This assertion is simply false. While it is beyond the scope of this article to engage in detail with the voluminous secondary literature on Popper’s political philosophy, some interesting works are Fuller, The Governance of Science; Shearmur, The Political Thought of Karl Popper; Jarvie and Pralong, Popper’s Open Society After 50 Years; Notturno, Hayek and Popper; Stokes and Sheamur, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Popper; Sassower and Laor, eds., The Impact of Critical Rationalism. Hélène Landemore’s recent Open Democracy is more subtly influenced by Popperian ideas.

^8. Emberly and Cooper, Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 69.

^9. Eidlin, “Popper and Democratic Theory,” 74.

^10. I limit my observations (almost) exclusively to The Open Society as it represents Popper’s most sustained engagement with social and political theory—and I hope to demonstrate that this work has plenty of underexplored potential. It is true, as Katharina Forrester argues (see “Tocqueville Anticipated Me”), that Popper gravitated to more conservative positions later in his life. But this is not the concern of the present paper.

^11. This is an original interpretation that cannot be found in the secondary literature. However, apart from Mark Notturno’s work, which I discuss in some detail, I find some affinities with Fred Eidlin’s diagnosis of a “radical, revolutionary strain” in Popper and John Thrasher’s idea of the open society as one that is open to disagreement.

^12. Honig, The Displacement of Politics, 201.

^13. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 81.

^14. For such accounts, see for instance Pralong, “Minima Moralia”; Müller, “Die Offene Gesellschaft Neu Gelesen”; Ignatieff and Roch, Rethinking Open Society; Salamun, Ein Jahrhundertdenker.

^15. Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, chap. 3.

^16. Wenman, Agonistic Democracy.

^17. Edyvane, “Justice as Conflict,” 329.

^18. Honig, The Displacement of Politics.

^19. Wenman, Agonistic Democracy, 33.

^20. One reviewer pushed me on agonism’s “opposition to rationalism.” I am grateful for this as I believe that, on closer inspection, a further parallel between agonism and Popper arises at this point. As noted, it is true that the agonistic tradition positions itself against forms of rationalism that believe in the permanent resolution of conflicts. This position, however, does not rule out the possibility (indeed, the necessity) of a temporary resolution of certain conflicts; that is, agonists are not categorically opposed to rational consensus per se, but only to the idea of a permanent consensus that shuts down contestation and resistance. And this idea, as will become clear, chimes particularly well with Popper’s “critical rationalism,” which denies the possibility of “permanent solutions” to social, moral, and political problems, and insists that all “solutions” must remain open to contestation.

^21. The literature on critical rationalism is vast. I only want to highlight two more recent and interesting sources: Afisi, Karl Popper and Africa applies Popper’s theory in general and his critical rationalism in particular to various African contexts. And Sassower and Laor, The Impact of Critical Rationalism explicitly seeks to overcome the divide between analytic and continental philosophy through the idea of critical rationalism.

^22. See also Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations.

^23. And the only time in which Popper gives it a significant meaning is in the following passage: “Our Western civilization is an essentially pluralistic one … monolithic social ends would mean the death of freedom; of the freedom of thought, of the free search for truth, and with it, of the rationality and dignity of man” (510).

^24. Vincent, “Nationalism and the Open Society,” 54.

^25. Stelzer, “Principles and Policies,” 377.

^26. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 119. For an insightful recent account of Nietzsche’s notions of agonism and enmity, see Kirkland, “Nietzsche, Agonistic Politics, and Spiritual Enemy.”

^27. For such a mistake, see Roch, “Educating Skeptical but Passionate Citizens,” 48–49.

^28. Tully, Strange Multiplicity. I am not interested here in the question if Tully really “is” an agonist or if the deliberative elements in his theory water down his agonism.

^29. Tully, “The Unfreedom of Moderns,” 218.

^30. There is, of course, nothing wrong with “agonistic optimism” (see Honig, “The Optimistic Agonist”). But for me the concept of tragedy means, above all, two things: first, the inescapability of making tough choices (think, for instance, of Antigone’s dilemma); second, the idea that even “good” things come at a price. We find these two intertwined notions of tragedy in Popper’s work, which adds depth to the agonistic idea of tragedy.

^31. Gellner, “Karl Popper,” 78.

^32. See in this context Tully’s uncharacteristically harsh criticism of Berlin in “‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Context.”

^33. Lilla, “Über Identitätspolitik,” 129, 140.

^34. Notturno, Hayek and Popper, 119–20.

^35. Urbinati, Me, the People.

^36. Stanley, How Fascism Works.

^37. Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.

^38. Ignatieff and Roch, eds., Rethinking Open Society; Engler, Die Offene Gesellschaft und Ihre Grenzen.

^39. Mouffe, On the Political.

^40. In some respects, my account of the “presumption of inclusion” chimes with the central argument of Robert Talisse’s recent Sustaining Democracy. Talisse does not use the concept of open society or draw on Popper. I received his book only after I had finished this article, yet there are some striking similarities between Talisse’s ideas of how to “sustain democracy” by treating “the other side” as equals and my agonistic interpretation of The Open Society.

^41. Ignatieff, “Introduction” to Rethinking Open Society, 1–2.

^42. Lilla, “Open Society as an Oxymoron,” 18.

^43. See also Popper, “Utopia and Violence.”

^44. Notturno, Hayek and Popper.

^45. See, for instance, Stokes, “Popper and Habermas,” or Landemore, Open Democracy.

^46. Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism”; Knops, “Agonism as Deliberation.”

^47. Thrasher, “Agreeing to Disagree,” 1147.

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Christof Royer

Christof Royer, PhD, is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Central European University, Hungary/Austria, and an Assistant Professor at Forward College (Paris). His research, which straddles International Relations, Political Theory and International Law, seeks to address questions surrounding mass atrocities, global justice, globalisation, human rights, political violence, contemporary practices of surveillance and democratic struggles and contestations.