Su Popper

Ho scritto qualcosa sul Mises Blog, ma ho problemi a mandare il commento, uso il blog per salvare. Non sono sicurissimo di alcuni dettagli, sarebbe ora di riprendere in mano la Open Society, ma non ho proprio tempo…

I approached classical liberalism reading Popper, several years ago, then I finally switched to Mises. Mises is my favourite thinker and I think that Mises’s theoretical system is lacking in no more than a handful of aspects: (1) he neglected the idea of the state (better Rothbard), (2) he neglected international relations (unsettled problem of classical liberalism and libertarianism), (3) he neglected jurisprudence (better Leoni), (4) he neglected the importance of domestic balance of power (better Jouvenel), (5) he neglected integralism and fanaticism (not completely, more on this in the following).

All these limitations he shared with Popper. But Popper had some more.

Popper made no attempt to distinguish between democracy and freedom: he only distinguished progressive social engineering and totalitarian social revolution.

Mises had the former distinction clear, as he believed that government ought not to do more than enforcing laws and defending boundaries: Popper proposed no effective limitations in the scope of government intervention.

For what concerns the latter distinction, which is the core of Popper’s political philosophy, Popper was only concerned that politicians could have had fanatical goals (compare for instance Talmon’s totalitarian democracy, a history of French philosophy before, during and immediately after the Revolution), but whatever the majority’s choice, Popper has nothing to oppose except common sense (that’s not exactly the more abundant virtue in politics). In other words, Popper’s thought is one-dimensional, moderately socialist and more or less disconnected with the themes of classical economics.

In a sense, one of the five limitations of Mises has been partially addressed by Popper: his common sense. Surely not because Mises lacked it, but Popper’s "obvious" political thought is a good therapy against fanaticism.

Popper has been one of the many, possibly one of the first, thinkers who understood the importance of fanaticism in the political tragedies of his time, together with, for instance, Hoffer, Hayek and Talmon, at his time, and Glucksmann, more recently. Apart from this, I find his political philosophy rather uninteresting, and its conception of freedom dangerously close to that of that special brand of gulag-less socialists called, in the US, "liberals". Most people may confuse ideological differences with theoretical differences, but I won’t: I’m just perplexed by Popper from both points of view.

Finally, Mises was a moral relativist, so was Popper, and so am I. For a relativist, a moral system cannot be defended on purely rational grounds, notwithstanding the importance of this defense (the "moral conundrum", although there is nothing mysterious about it). Mises understood the importance of widespread acceptance of some moral/legal rules by part of the majority, to have a stable social order. My impression is that Popper believed that contemporary unlimited democracy was under all aspects good, and found nothing strange in the incredible concentration of power in the hands of our “representatives”: the reasoning being, most likely, that he thought he could find a way out of the "moral conundrum" in the will of the majority. In the end he found no fault in contemporary democracies, where the state has the widest role in every aspect of our lives. Something impermissible, in the XX century, although understandable, after gulags and lagers…

Popper may be good to save someone from Marx, provided that someone so fool to believe in Marx can be saved at all. Popper may be good in saving someone from positivism (and you are wholly right claiming he wa no positivist), and I could make the same irony about the chances of saving them. I believe his thought to be of no avail for more complicated tasks.