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Western Political Thought

Notes • Comforth, in The Open Philosophy and the Open Enemies (1968), charged Popper for regarding
capitalism and the open society as coextensive, and for believing that capitalism had changed
fundamentally. For him, “friends of the open society, who are organizing to get rid of
capitalism, are its enemies; and the enemies of the open society, who are organizing to
preserve capitalism as its friends”. The fight for an open society, in reality, was a fight
against anything and everything that was done to prevent exploitation of man by man. He
did not accept the charge that Communism would destroy individual freedom, reinforce
dogmatism, and undermine science, the arts, culture, and eventually civilization. Communism
did not stand for lawless tyranny and violence.
• Cornforth’s defence of Marxism against Popper was merely polemical, without much
substance. He ignored the fact that unlike many other well-known critics, Popper did not
attack totalitarian Marxism at its weakest but at its strongest, which led Berlin to acclaim that
Popper provided the “most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and
historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer” To this, Magee observed, “I must
confess I do not see how any rational man can have read Popper’s critique of Marx and still
be a Marxist”.
• Berlin rejected the deterministic outlook of Marxism, and questioned the entire argument of
providing the right goal for all individuals. Instead the focus was on today, rather than chase
chimerical Utopias of tomorrow. The idea of Utopia for Berlin, like Popper, was philosophically
dubious, hideously dangerous and logically incoherent. Both ruled out finality in anything.
While, for Berlin, a Utopian society meant lack of free choice and Monist values, namely one
idea of good life, for Popper, a blueprint of a perfect ideal meant statism and arrested
growth. It precluded what he called “unplanned planning”.
• Like Popper, Berlin attacked the historicism of Hegel and Marx, which he developed in his
essay, Historical Inevitability (1954). Many of Berlin’s arguments were similar to those of
Popper, except that Berlin was emphatic that the historicism of Hegel and Marx denied free
human will which enabled them to absolve historians from censuring the villains in history.
Historicism was some kind of metaphysical mystery. Both Hegel and Marx defined freedom
as obedience to a rational will, namely the idea of positive liberty, rather than seeing freedom
as choice, as reflected in the writings of Locke, Hume and J.S. Mill. Choice implied conflict
among rival goods, whereas rational will suggested one way of life, one life plan that would
be the same for most, if not all the people.
• Berlin’s inherent faith in pluralism led him to defend freedom as choice or negative liberty
for each individual, each culture and each nation. Each historical period had its own goals,
aspirations and conceptions of good life, and it was impossible to unite them into an
overarching, single, theoretical system in which all ends would be realized without any
clashes and conflicts. For Berlin, values, however ultimate they may be, did and could exclude
one another, and their incompatibility had to be reconciled through a constant process of
compromise and trade-offs instead of a false synthesis. Thus, Berlin was a critic of
Enlightenment rationalism, which suggested the uninterrupted progress of history and the
possibility of synthesizing all values. The master idea for Berlin was pluralism, which
suggested that there was no single master idea, meaning that there were many conceptions
of good life, a good society, and that these goods were often, at least sometimes,
incommensurable and incompatible. A Monist was compared to a hedgehog, who knew one
Grand Idea. Marx, Hegel and Plato were hedgehogs. A pluralist knew many things, like a
fox.
• Rejecting Monism, Berlin attacked the metaphysical content behind positive liberty, that
everything could be explained with reference to a single homogeneous principle and

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