The Political Thought of Karl Popper by Jeremy

A nyone who reads Jeremy Shearmur’s book will be struck by the degree to which Popper’s vast output is an integrated work. In particular, Popper’s political thought is closely connected with his explanation of science. One of Popper’s more impressive achievements was to expose the authoritarian element in the Western intellectual tradition. For instance, traditional theories of knowledge address the question: what is the source of true belief? They assert that a theory cannot be accepted as genuine unless it can be positively justified, that is, proven true. They only identify knowledge with certain knowledge, thereby demanding very high epistemological standards. Traditional theories of knowledge recognise different foundations of knowledge but they all share the feature that some unquestionable authority must be appealed to in order to legitimise our beliefs—whether that authority is the power of the intellect (in the case of Descartes and Spinoza), the evidence of the senses (logical positivism) or some other source. A similar authoritarian bias permeates the traditional conception of politics. The fundamental problem that has engaged political thinkers, from Plato to Marx, has been the question: who should rule the state? Plato’s answer was simply ‘the best’ should rule, and possibly ‘the best few—the aristocrats’, but certainly not the many, the people. For Marx it was ‘the workers’ who should rule rather than ‘the capitalists’ (Popper, 1988, pp. 23–24). Popper developed an approach to knowledge and to politics which was free of authoritarian assumptions. As for his theory of knowledge, Popper argues that we learn from our mistakes, by trial and the elimination of error. He applied this simple idea to science and to politics. According to Popper, all our beliefs are guesses about the world, mere conjectures. What is distinctive about science is that we seek systematically to make our theories open to interpersonal criticism and empirical testing, with a view to discovering our mistakes as soon as possible: