The Open Society and Its Enemies

The purpose of the three chapters contained in “The Myth of Origin and Destiny” is to describe Plato’s formative years, establish his intellectual background, and discuss Plato’s well-known Theory of Forms or Ideas. This approach is necessary to understand why Popper considers Plato the source of historicism and totalitarianism.

First, Popper dissects the problem of historicism in social sciences, which he alluded in the Introduction. Historicism assumes that historic events are outside human control as a result of broad-scale historic conditions and trends, historic destiny, or even God. Historicism focuses on great ideas, states, and leaders rather than an average person:

There is no doubt that the doctrine of the chosen people grew out of the tribal form of social life. Tribalism, i.e. the emphasis on the supreme importance of the tribe without which the individual is nothing at all, is an element which we shall find in many forms of historicist theories. Other forms which are no longer tribalist may still retain an element of collectivism; they may still emphasize the significance of some group or collective—for example, a class—without which the individual is nothing at all (8).

Popper returns to the theme of tribalism throughout this work as he links it to the collectivist mindset and, in turn, to totalitarianism. He classifies both fascism, on the Right, and Marxism, on the Left, as totalitarian ideologies that rely on historicism. Popper traces totalitarianism to Plato—the ultimate proponent of Greek historicism (8-10).

Historicism addresses the issue of change. Several Greek philosophers, including Parmenides, Democritus, Aristotle, and Plato himself tackled the problem of a changing world first introduced by Heraclitus (535–475 BCE). As a result, Popper examines the work of Heraclitus and the way it influenced Plato. The first Greek philosopher to focus on historicism—sweeping historic trends and the belief in mankind’s degeneration—was Hesiod. However, Heraclitus was the one to identify the notion of change (9-11). Popper considers Heraclitus an anti-democratic, historicist philosopher whose work relied on mystical thinking (12-13, 16). Heraclitus generally linked change with the notion of hidden destiny (14). Popper, in turn, correlates Heraclitus’s belief in historic destiny with social upheaval as a general trend:

It seems as if historicist ideas easily become prominent in times of great social change. […] It appears to be more than a mere coincidence that Hegel, who adopted so much of Heraclitus’ thought and passed it on to all modern historicist movements, movements, was a mouthpiece of the reaction against the French Revolution (16).

The author pays attention to the early Greek philosophers’ views of change in order to set the scene for his analysis of Plato’s political philosophy. Specifically, Popper considers Plato a reactionary who viewed political and social changes in a negative light.

First, however, Popper must discuss Plato’s biography. His family background is relevant to his political philosophy because Plato was of royal blood. According to Greek tradition, his family traced itself to the god of the sea, Poseidon—one of the key Olympic deities (18, 25). Plato’s status as a socially privileged individual is connected to his view of the most desirable social structure, in which everyone has a rightful place and social mobility does not exist.

The general historic circumstances in Plato’s lifetime are also important. He lived at a time of great social and political unrest, such as the rivalry between the city-states of Athens and Sparta, which culminated in the Peloponnesian War. These turbulent events resulted in famines, epidemics, and terror. Most relevant to Plato was the execution of his teacher Socrates (16-17).

Witnessing social unrest significantly impacted Plato’s thinking, including the realm of historicism and its relationship with change in society (19-20, 30). One of Plato’s recurrent themes throughout his works—elevated to the level of a cosmic law—is that all social change is the equivalent of corruption and degeneration. Popper demonstrates how Plato drew upon the thought of Heraclitus to argue, in the Statesman, that historic forces are cosmic and the Golden Age of the past was the age of Cronos—one of the original Titans in Greek mythology (18). Yet Plato conceded that it is imperative for cosmic turning points to occur simultaneously with the law of human actions (19). If change is the equivalent of decay, Plato asserted, then the perfect state is the one that is free of change. The ideal state is, therefore, the arrested state. Parmenides’s theory of the unchanging, ideal world was, therefore, quite influential for Plato (27). For this reason, the Golden Age is found in the distant past (19, 23).

Plato’s belief in the perfect state is also directly linked to his Theory of Forms or Ideas. Established by Plato in Timaeus, the theory states that imperfect sensible things in the physical world have perfect counterparts—Forms or Ideas—in the abstract space. These Forms impress themselves on physical things (20, 24). Popper compares Plato’s Forms or Ideas to certain aspects of Greek religion, specifically divine ancestor veneration, such as Plato’s connection to Poseidon. Here, gods may be described as immutable and eternal, whereas humans they impressed themselves upon are mutable and imperfect. Popper believes that Plato introduced the Theory of Forms or Ideas to establish stability and to identify the similarities between things (25-26).

Overall, this theory has three goals: to serve as a methodological device; to explain change, decay, and corruption; and, in practical politics, to create instruments capable of arresting change as part of social engineering. In fact, for Plato, real-world political ends are linked to historicist doctrines. In other words, Plato represents the blend of theoretic historicism and practical historicist social engineering (28, 23).