252
PAR TIS A N R
IE
V
lEW
This kind of statement drives Popper, at bottom a good nineteenth–
century rationalist, to withering scorn. Mannheim's attempts to unveil
the secret sources of ideas he ridicules as "socioanalysis"-the sociologist's
brand of psychoanalysis. "Self-analysis," says Popper, "is no substitute
for those practical actions which are necessary for establishing the
democratic institutions which alone can guarantee the freedom of
critical thought."
Granted; but how to guarantee that the "practical actions"
be
taken? The fact is that knowledge is not enough to produce right con–
duct. Popper himself is not unaware of the inadequacy of unassisted
reason: he makes the appropriate references to Lord Acton. But his
sense of the corruptibility of man is not vivid. A sturdy confidence in
human rationality, indeed, is both his weakness and his strength.
Popper himself, in a rare mood of humility, confessed that, on
revising his book for the American edition, "the strong feeling of
optimism which pervades the whole book struck me more and more as
naive. . . . My own voice began to sound to me as if it came from the
distant past-like the voice of one of the hopeful social reformers of
the eighteenth or even the seventeenth century." This essential optimism
accounts for the book's tonic quality: it fizzes, but it also may go
flat on long exposure to the air. For Popper's philosophy is really not
wholly adequate to the somber dilemmas of our time.
The power of the closed society lies not alone in the historicist
heresies of Plato, Hegel and Marx. It lies deep within ourselves. The
open society calls for men who can continuously transcend their own
limitations: this mere humanity has rarely been able to achieve. Of our
contemporary social thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr has cast most light
on this tragic paradox. Popper, in his lucid and buoyant optimism, has
little sense of the basic tragedy. Mannheim, fumbling and stumbling,
seemed to have a vague intuition of it; but he kept telling himself that
he could solve the tragedy by the "sociology of knowledge." Still both
books are of interest; and Popper's particularly shows a bright, fresh
and cocky mind usefully at work and play in the midst of the great
social issues of our age.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
the hans hofmann school of fine art
52 west 8th street
new york
city
phone gramercy 7-3491
morning • afternoon • evening
