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Subject Area: Political Theory

Popper, Relativism, & Freedom - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Autumn 1980, vol. 3, No. 3 [1980]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Popper, Relativism, & Freedom

Henry B. Veatch

  • Georgetown University

“Plato, Popper and the Open Society: Reflections on Who May Have the Last Laugh.” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, No. 2(Summer 1979):159–172.

lf0353-11_1980v3_007

By abandoning Plato's concept of a fixed human nature, Karl Popper may have thrown out the very concept that is necessary to support the kind of open society he wants to defend against Plato. Popper believes that a normative ideal based on a fixed human nature will not suffice for two reasons, one “scientific,” another “existential.” Popper's “scientific” reason for opposing fixed natures is that genuine theories are unable to disclose the way the world really ought to be, since they can't even disclose the way the world really is. At best, science can only tell us the way that the world really is not.

Popper's “existential” reason is that a fixed human nature would impose a closure on possible human values that is incompatible with our responsibility to freely choose our own values. Popper would see moral freedom constrained by any theory that would limit the possible values that can be selected from “World 3” (Popper's term for the realm of the imaginable).

However, when Popper makes his own values selection from World 3—in the form of an “open society”—he must either succumb to an utter arbitrariness or have a legitimate way of going beyond the limits of science and “imposed” values. He would be succumbing to arbitrariness if he didn't tell us why his particular image of man is to be preferred to that of Plato or anyone else. But if all theories must either avoid telling us the way man really is and ought to be, or end up imposing some image of man upon all of us, how can Popper defend his preferred image of man as the preferable image? Seemingly, he can do so only by restoring the Platonic notion of nonscientific knowledge of the preferable, and of a fixed human nature on which it rests. By this means, an open society can be defended by basing it on a justified image of man.