The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath by Karl Popper

Author:Karl Popper [Popper, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHILOSOPHY. PSYCHOLOGY, Philosophy of mind
ISBN: 9780691019727
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1966-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

As an example of the refusal to take serious arguments

seriously, I select Toynbee's treatment of Marx. My reasons for this selection are the following. First, it is a topic which is familiar to myself as well as to the reader of this book. Secondly, it is a topic in which I agree with Toynbee in most of its practical aspects. His main judgements on Marx's political and historical influence are very similar to results at which I have arrived by more pedestrian methods ; and it is indeed one of the topics where I have been amazed by his historical intuition. Thus I will hardly be suspected of being an apologist for Marx if I defend Marx's rationality against Toynbee. For this is the point in which I disagree : Toynbee treats Marx (as he treats everybody) not as a rational being, a man who offers arguments for what he teaches. Indeed, the treatment of Marx, and of his theories, only exemplifies the general impression conveyed by Toynbee's work that arguments are an important mode of speech, and that the history of mankind is a history of emotions, passions, religions, irrational philosophies, and perhaps of art and poetry ; but that it has nothing whatever to do with the history of human reason or of human science. (Names like Galileo and Newton, frarvey and Pasteur, do not play any part in the first six volumes 45 of Toynbee's historicist study of the life-cycle of civilizations.) Regarding the points of similarity between Toynbee's and my general views of Marx, I may remind the reader of my allusions, in chapter i, to the analogy between the chosen people and the chosen class ; and in various other places, I have commented critically upon Marx's doctrines of historical necessity, and especially of the inevitability of the social revolution. These ideas are linked together by Toynbee with his usual brilliance : * The distinctively Jewish . . inspiration of Marxism', he writes 46 , c is the apocalyptic vision of a violent revolution which is inevitable because it is the decree . . of God himself, and which is to invert the present roles of Proletariat and Dominant Minority in . . a reversal of roles which is to carry the Chosen People, at one bound, from the lowest to the highest place in the Kingdom of This World. Marx has taken the Goddess " Historical Necessity " in place of Yahweh for his omnipotent deity, and the internal proletariat of the modern Western World in place of Jewry ; and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. But the salient features of the traditional Jewish apocalypse protrude through this threadbare disguise, and it is actually the pre-Rabbinical Maccabaean Judaism that our nhilosonher-inmresario is n resenting* in modern Western

costume . .' Now there is certainly not much in this brilliantly phrased passage with which I do not agree, as long as it is intended as nothing more than an interesting analogy.

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