HISTORICAL LAWS
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individuals who must be subordinated to the inherent laws governing
these totalities has often justified tyranny and the enslavement of men
by the powers that be. But the category of "holism" is also applied by
Popper to the opposite theoretical tradition, exemplified by Marxian
theory. According to this theory, the appearance of the Nation and
the State and the Society as separate totalities reflects only a specific
economic structure of class society, and a free society involves the disap–
pearance of this "holism." Popper joins the two incompatible theories
with what he calls "Utopianism" and thus establishes the alliance of
Plato and Marx-a fantastic syndrome playing an important part in his
demonstration of the "unholy alliance" between historicism and U top–
ianism. The latter notion soon reveals its concrete political content:
... we find historicism very frequently allied with just those ideas which
are typical of holistic or Utopian social engineering, such as the idea of
"blueprints for a new order," or of "centralized planning."
For Popper, Plato was a pessimistic Utopian holist: his blueprint aimed
at arresting all change; Marx was an optimist who "predicted, and
tried actively to further" the Utopian ideal of a society without political
and economic coercion.
We do not wish to dwell again on the semantics of the term
Utopianism: as the word loses more and more of its traditional con–
tent, it becomes an instrument of political defamation. Industrial civili–
zation has reached the stage where most of what could formerly be
called Utopian now has a
"topos"
among the real possibilities and capa–
bilities of this civilization. Moreover, ideas and efforts, which once were
"Utopian," have been playing an increasingly decisive part in the con–
quest of nature and society, and there is awareness of the tremendous
forces which may be released and utilized through the encouragement
of "Utopian" thought.
In
the Soviet Union, science fiction writers are
being taken to task for lagging behind science in their dreams and phan–
tasies and they are told to "get their imagination off the ground"
(New
York Times,
July 9, 1958). Political interest in maintaining the status
quo rather than logical or scientific impossibility today makes real pos–
sibilities appear as Utopian. Popper lends weight to his attack on Utop–
ianism by again "constructing" the theory he attacks rather than criti–
cizing the theory as it actually is.
It
is hardly justifiable to call Marx's
brief outline of the initial institutional prerequisites for socialism a
blueprint for the "social engineering" of an ideal society (he did not
make centralized planning the distinguishing feature of socialism, and
he never designated socialism as an "ideal society").
