17/09/2013
Tenured Lecturer of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid
Karl Popper (Vienna 1902 - London 1994) was a peculiar liberal whose contribution deserves to be remembered nearly two decades after his death. Unlike other liberal thinkers and philosophers, Popper did not come to liberalism through the knowledge of liberal political thought or the political experience of liberalism. By contrast, young Popper's contact with politics, deep in Vienna's early 20th centurysocial virulence, was not featured by reflection or by the expression of a constitutional practice consistent with the protection of individual rights and the limitation of government. His early progressivism took him to be an active member among the advocates of social revolution, although he would end up disappointed.
The political landscape of the nascent 20th century, Popper's education time, was marked by the defeat of liberalism andthe unstoppable rise of totalitarianism.This is why Popper found in science, as an activity always open to the knowledge of truth, the inspiration on which he would shape his liberal political ideals. It was science, not politics which pointed to a paradigmatic model of progress in which freedom was linked to a permanent opening to that established as truth. Thus Popper was first and foremost a philosopher of science, an expert of its methodology, who published early in time his brilliant workThe Logic of Scientific Discovery(1934).But soon after,however, he led the study of the logic of scientific progress to the field of social and political progress.
As many of the philosophers of his generation, Popper was confronted with the horrors of 20thcentury totalitarianism and felt compelled to explain it. This is what he did in his great political workThe Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)where that permanent opening to the truth of science, which makes all certainties become provisional hypotheses, is takento the evaluation of political systems and ideals.For Popper, the typical progress of science, the permanent reversibility and revocation of its statements, can be linked to liberal political systems, since these establish a type of gradual social engineering that makes all political decisions temporary and revisable. On the contrary, totalitarian political systems, with their abstract ideologies alien to the contrast with reality, establish a utopian engineering which, far from feeling discredited by its results, considers itself as above and apart from all experience, whatever the damage its application may cause to men. For Popper, this is the permanent lesson that science offers to politics. A lesson that is as valid today as when it was made, in times of profound darkness.
*Karl Popper died on September 17, 1994.