248
PARTIS,AN RIEVIEW
Economic intervention, Popper further argues, must take the form of
planning the framework of the economy, not of trying to plan each and
every economic decision. Above all, the piecemeal engineer must ask
no questions about the tendencies of history or the destiny of man. "The
future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical
necessity."
This summary hardly suggests the qualities of this rich, voluble,
exasperating book. Popper's story line is embellished all along the way
by a bewildering variety of idiosyncratic opinions,
obiter dicta,
guffaws,
snorts, sarcasms, and cries of outrage. His argument has its contradic–
tions and inconsistencies. At times, he seems to suggest that ideas are
everything: if only Plato and Hegel had held different doctrines, then
the world would have moved carelessly and gracefully into the open
society. Yet, for all this, the book has an indignant common sense on the
crucial issues which makes it an important contribution to the revalua–
tion of liberalism.
If
Popper's manner is one of breaking windows and letting in air,
Karl Mannheim seems always to be drawing the curtains and turning
lights off.
Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning,
a collection of
papers assembled after Mannheim's death into a fairly coherent volume,
is a clogged and earnest book. The argument drones on and on, taking an
unconscionable time ever to pass a given point. Much of it is con–
taminated by what Popper calls historicism.
Yet it is a book with some points of interest. Mannheim came to
Britain in 1933 with a basic faith in the idea of benevolent central
planning. This faith was derived partly from the continental Social
Democracy in which he was educated; partly from his conviction that
the sociology of knowledge, by providing a means of exposing and con–
trolling the role of self-interest in ideas, would lead to a new ob–
jectivity in the social sciences. But his British experience gave Mann–
heim a sense of the resources of pluralist society. Discussions with
T. S. Eliot and
J.
Middleton Murry forced
him
to revise his attitude
toward religion. These new influences are reflected in this last book.
Freedom, Power and Democratic Planning
begins by rehearsing at
too great length the familiar arguments about the disintegration of
capitalist society, the rise of fascism and Communism and the need
for something in between. Mannheim calls his "Third Way"
"planning
for freedom";
and by this, it soon appears, he means central, overhead
planning. The New Deal approach, for example, is dismissed as con–
sisting of "piecemeal conceptions of preventive planning," while "the
British pattern comes closest to what we call 'planning for freedom.' "
