HISTORICAL LAWS
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increasing power of the State is sufficiently noticeable in societies which
are not exactly chaarcterized by a predominance of "holist" doctrines
and in which the "piecemeal" rather than the totalitarian approach pre–
vailed. Were liberal gradualism and pluralism perhaps derived from the
belief in a "law" no less "inexorable" than that assumed by the "holists"
namely, the law of the market, expressing the harmony between the
freely competing private interests and the general welfare? Has the
market equalized or aggravated the initial inequality and the conflicts
of interests generated by it? Has free competition, economic and
in–
tellectual, prevented or promoted the concentration of power and the
corrosion of individual liberties? Have not these trends, in the democra–
cies too, reached the point where the State is increasingly called upon
to regulate and protect the whole? The existence of countervailing pow–
ers seems to be of little avail if they themselves impel centralization, and
if the opposition is in the same boat as the power which it opposes.
Moreover, industrial civilization has, at the national and international
level, so closely interrelated economic and political, local and large scale,
particular and general processes that effective "piecemeal social engin–
eering" appears as affecting the whole structure of society and threaten–
ing a fundamental change. Whether or not these trends lead to ter–
roristic totalitarianism, depends, not on a philosophy of history and
society but on the existence of social groups willing and strong enough
to attack the economic and political roots of totalitarianism. These
roots are in the pre-totalitarian era.
If
these are really the observable trends, then the abstract opposi–
tion between liberalism and totalitarianism implied in Popper's presen–
tation does not adequately express the state of affairs. Instead, the
latter rather seems to suggest a "dialectical" relationship between two
historical periods of one and the same form of society. Popper's re–
jection of dialectics is not incidental: an anti-dialectical logic is essential
to his argument.
It
is so because dialectical logic is throughout permeated
with what he designates as "historicism": its method and its notions
are shaped in accordance with the historical structure of reality. Far
from "denying the validity of logic," dialectical logic intends to rescue
logic by bridging the gap between the laws of thought and those gov–
erning reality-a gap which is itself the result of the historical develop–
ment. Dialectical logic attempts to accomplish this task by bringing
the two manifestations of reality to their actual common denominator,
namely,
history.
In
its metaphysical form, this is also the core of Hegel's
dialectic: Subject and Object, Mind and Nature-the two traditional
"substances"-are from the beginning conceived as an antagonistic
