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capitalism" and especially of fascism appears as the driving force behind
this policy, and no "holist" philosophy is required to explain it. The
theoretical discussion was crushed, not consummated, by the Stalinist
plan. As to the purges of the middle and late 'thirties and then again
of the late 'forties: I cannot see how they are attributable to a philo–
sophical concept by any stretch of the imagination.
These brief comments may serve to indicate one of the major de–
fects of Popper's book. A philosophical analysis which remains abstract
to the extent that it never reaches the historical dimension in which
mass violence emerges and operates is of little value in explaining and
combating it. I shall attempt to show that Popper's generalizations are
theoretically untenable- but they also do violence to the empirical facts
and events. To be sure, terror is and remains in all its forms and cir–
cumstances a crime against humanity-an instrument of domination
and exploitation. This does not change the fact that terror has had
very different historical functions and very different social contents:
it has been used for the preservation of the status quo and for its over–
throw, for the streamlining of a declining society and for the release of
new political and economic forces. Understanding the historical function
of terror may be an indispensable weapon for combating it. The horror
of slaughter does not wipe out the difference between the Jacobin
terror and that of the post-Thermidorian reaction, between the terror
of the dying Commune and that against it, between the Red and the
White terror- a difference which is
not
a subtle philosophical point but
a struggle of opposing political forces that changed the course of history.
II
Popper's analysis of totalitarianism is part of his sweeping critique
of historicism. The meaning which Popper gives to this term is strikingly
unusual:
... I mean by "historicism" an approach to the social sciences which
assumes that
historical prediction
is their principal aim, and which as–
sumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the "rhythm" or the
"pattern," the "laws" or the "trends" that underlie the evolution of
history.. . . And I have not hesitated to construct arguments in its
support which have never, to my knowledge, been brought forward by
historicists themselves. I hope that, in this way, I have succeeded in
building up a position really worth attacking.
The last statement deserves some attention before we take a closer look
at this notion of historicism. What a strange method: to build up a
position really worth attacking and then to attack it! Why does the
