1.26
PARTISAN REVIEW
But this may be irrelevant exegesis: what really matters to Popper
is the argument against the "holistic" idea of social change, i.e., the idea
that "social experiments, in order to be realistic, must be of the char–
acter of Utopian attempts at remodeling the whole of society." We
have already indicated the basis for Popper's rejection of this idea:
his contention that "the whole of society" is a logically and scientifically
untenable notion. Against it, Popper advocates the "piecemeal" ap–
proach to social experiments, concentrating on the fight against "defin–
ite wrongs, against concrete forms of injustice or exploitation, and
avoidable suffering such as poverty or unemployment." He supports
this position by a pluralistic philosophy of history. According to it, one
may interpret history in terms of class struggles, or of religious ideas,
or of races, or of the struggle between the "open" and the "closed"
society, etc.:
All these are more or less interesting points of view, and
as such
per–
fectly unobjectionable. But historicists do not present them as such:
they do not see that there is necessarily a plurality of interpretations
which are fundamentally on the same level of both suggestiveness and
arbitrariness (even though some of them may be distinguished by their
fertility-a
point of some importance).
The parenthesis contains indeed a point of some importance-so much
so that the concept of "fertility," if elaborated, may well cancel the
complete relativism expressed in the preceding passage. And as to the
historicists not seeing this relativism: the view expressed by Popper has
been one of the most representative positions of traditional historicism.
IV
Popper has herewith restated some of the philosophical foundations
of classical liberalism; Hayek looms large in the supporting footnotes,
and the critique of historicism is largely a justification of liberalism
against totalitarianism. Liberalism and totalitarianism appear as two
diametrically opposed systems: opposed in their economics and politics
as well as in their philosophy. The question is: does this picture cor–
respond to the actual relation between liberalism and totalitarianism?
It is a vital question, and especially vital for a genuine and effective
critique of anti-liberal philosophies. One does not have to accept the
Marxian thesis that free, competitive, private capitalism leads, precisely
by virtue of its inherent normal development, to totalitarianism (i.e., in–
creasing centralization of economic and political power, ultimately exer–
cised by the state) in order to suspect that a liberalistic society is not
immune to totalitarian trends and forces. The tendency towards the
