Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance

Karl Popper (1902-1994) was a very important philosopher of science.  I have enormous respect and admiration for him.  I think it's crucial to study Popper in order to understand the development of the philosophy of science over the 20th century - how it led up to him, what he contributed to it, and how it developed beyond him.  His principle of falsifiability, in particular, is a profoundly insightful, yet subtly nuanced concept, that is often misunderstood (and often confused with Lakatos's falsificationism) and which, itself, developed in sometimes surprising ways over the course of Popper's lifetime.  (It's crucial to understand that Popper was not an empiricist or an inductionist - in fact, his motto was "theory comes first"!  Also, he liked to say that "The scientific method does not exist.")  I'm particularly interested in some of the ideas that David Deutsch has come up with in interpreting and developing Popper's ideas. 

But none of that is what I'm talking about today. Unfortunately, these days, when people bring up Popper, it is usually not to discuss the advances and the limitations of the concept of falsifiability, but rather, most of the time, it is to talk about the so-called "paradox of tolerance."

You see, in addition to his laudable work in the philosophy of science, Popper was also something of a political thinker - though in this area, I find his ideas much less impressive.  Popper claimed that he had been a Marxist as a teenager, but that he had grown disillusioned with Marxism in adulthood.  When he was in his forties, he wrote a sprawling two-volume opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which attacks Plato, Hegel, and Marx.  In my opinion, this work is frankly quite confused and badly researched.  In particular, he cartoonishly misinterprets Hegel in that work.  (In a way, perhaps that's not completely his fault.  Hegel can be pretty confusing, and Popper wasn't a specialist on the topic. Still, if you want to understand Hegel, there are far better resources for an introduction - unless you're a person like me, and you actually enjoy going into a new topic negatively.  By the way, I actually agree with Popper that Hegel's work was deeply rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle - a point that too many commentators today horribly miss.  But anyway, a good rule of thumb for Popper is: when he's explaining his own ideas, he's great.  When he's summarizing the ideas of other philosophers, get ready for some badly-researched nonsense.)  

I find that people often cite Popper without actually having read him. People often seem to think that Popper wrote a book entitled "The Paradox of Tolerance" (I've even seen people online referring to a supposed text called "The Paradox of Toleration") - but there is no such book.  There is not even an essay with that title.  Here's what he, in fact, does say, to quote it in full:

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." 

That's it.  That's the whole text about the "paradox of tolerance".  Is it an essay?  No.  It's just a (rather meandering and vague) paragraph.  It starts off pretty strong, but it gets more wishy-washy and confusing as it goes on.  Incitement to the revival of the slave trade?  Incitement to kidnapping?  These are well-known crimes, that we're all familiar with?  What is Popper talking about?  "You what would be good for society?  If people did a lot more kidnapping.  Let's all kidnap each other!"  You know how people are always saying this.  Everybody knows someone who is constantly trying to incite them to kidnap people.  I hate those guys.

Now, who is the "them" that he's referring to?  "Less well-known" - what does that mean?  Less well-known than what?  To understand that, we must understand the context.

People often assume that this paragraph is a stirring speech that Popper is giving against fascism.  In fact, this famous paragraph comes from a footnote (footnote 4, to be exact) to a chapter (7) of a book about Plato.  

(I can't help pointing out: Alfred North Whitehead famously said "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."  In this case, that's literally true: one of the most famous passages of political philosophy literally comes from a footnote to [a book about] Plato!)

Yes, yes, anyway: okay, so this is a footnote to the aforementioned book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and this is from Volume 1 of that two-volume work, "The Spell of Plato."  That's right, the "enemies" of open society (the "them") being discussed in this book are not (I repeat, NOT) the fascists, but rather: in Volume 1, Plato, and in Volume 2, Hegel and Marx.  "The Open Society and Its Enemies" is Popper's great anti-Marxist opus, and he decides to really dig into the roots of Marx by going all the way back to Plato.

So next time you're tempted to bring up "the parable of tolerance," just remember that Popper wasn't talking about fascists, he was talking about Platonists and Marxists.  Remember that it's those people that, according to Popper, we should have "the right to suppress."

In Chapter 7, Popper is discussing Plato's theory of the rule of the wise, or "philosopher-kings," and he brings up various arguments, including "the well-known paradox of freedom, which has been used first, and with success, by Plato.  In his criticism of democracy, and his story of the rise of the tyrant, Plato raises implicitly the following question: What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead?"  [emphasis Popper's]  Here he has a footnote - footnote 4.  

It makes sense that he would consign the rest of his argument to a footnote.  Notice that Popper says that Plato "raises implicitly" this question - he cannot claim that Plato raises this question explicitly, because, in fact, Plato says no such thing.  By burying it in the footnotes, I think he's more or less implicitly[!] acknowledging that he has wandered off topic, and he's no longer arguing against Plato exactly, but rather against a straw-man.  Never mind, it's an interesting question anyway.  Let him cook.

In footnote 4, Popper considers the paradox of freedom, in italics for some reason, or actually he starts off by mentioning the paradoxes of freedom and of democracy [sic].  He is at pains to find some textual examples of this in Plato's actual work.  It is true that in Book 8 of the Republic, Plato (through Socrates) describes democracy inevitably becoming tyranny.  But we must put this in context and remember that this description of a polity is all an extended metaphor for the individual psyche.  In any case, after briefly entertaining the paradoxes of freedom and of democracy, and leaving off rather inconclusively, he writes the already-quoted passage.

Which is pretty weird, come to think of it.  After bringing up some other paradoxes, which Popper ascribes to Plato (somewhat dubiously), Popper says, there's also this other "less well-known" paradox.  What exactly is Popper trying to say?  Is he also ascribing that paradox to Plato?  Probably not, but if not, then what is he trying to accomplish here?  Is he just riffing?  Or does he have a point?  Is the point that he's trying to refute two paradoxes by introducing a third paradox?  Is that it?  Does logic work that way?

(By the way - are we really seriously considering suppressing the philosophy of Plato?  Or at least the "right to suppress" Plato?  It seems obviously absurd, but... maybe it's not that far-fetched.  Celebrated Princeton classics scholar Dan-El Padilla Peralta has argued that the classics curriculum is inseperable from white supremacy and we need to "explode the canon".  Similarly, historian Walter Scheidel says we should "close Classics," and indeed Howard University decided in 2021 to close its classics department.  I think this is all a tempest in a teapot, and people will continue to be curious about Plato in the future, but... you never know, I guess.)

So Popper wasn't talking directly about fascists, but rather about Platonists and Marxists.  But that brings up an important question: what did Karl Popper think about fascism?  

The answer is: it's complicated.  On the one hand, Popper was ethnically Jewish (though his family had converted to Lutheranism, and he therefore was a baptized Christian) and fled his native Austria in 1937 for New Zealand, partly for fear of the spread of Hitler's regime.  So I have no doubt that Popper intensely disliked the nazi party.

That having been said, it should be pointed out that Popper stayed in Austria throughout the reign of the self-proclaimed "Austro-fascist" dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss, in the early 30s, and throughout that time, and even afterwards, I can find no evidence of Popper ever saying anything the slightest bit critical of Dollfuss or Austro-fascism.  As far as I can tell, Popper was quite comfortable with that form of fascism.  Indeed, it is quite possible to read that famous excerpted paragraph as a rationalization and justification for someone like Dollfuss and his regime to use force to suppress and stamp out the "intolerant" Marxists in Austria - and this reading would make perfect sense, given that this was, of course, an excerpt from a brick of a book that concludes with hundreds of pages of attacks on Marxists (and absolutely no references to Hitler, Dollfuss, or fascism, whatsoever).

We could really go down the rabbit hole and get into the depths of Popper's argument at this point - for instance, we could get into the fact that The Open Society and Its Enemies is in many respects a long, elaborate sequel to Popper's earlier, shorter work, The Poverty of Historicism.  In the beginning of that book, Popper does indeed make a brief, vague reference to fascism, but it's clear that the primary target of his criticism is again Marxism.  I think many of Popper's arguments against historicism are insightful and raise questions that are important to think about for the purpose of pursuing and developing social science, and indeed, in some cases, fully convincing.  But, rather bizarrely, here Popper also accuses Plato of historicism, which seems like a bit of a stretch in itself (yes, of course I know about Plato's aristocracy-timocracy-plutocracy-democracy-tyranny sequence).  And even if we were to accept that Plato was some kind of historicist, it is not at all obvious that Plato ascribed to the same kind of historicism as Hegel, or that Popper's anti-historicist arguments apply to Plato - or Hegel either, for that matter.  For one thing, very obviously, Plato's sequence of types of political regimes is a history of decline, not the promise of the necessity of political progress.  Heck, I'm not even entirely convinced that Marx himself was a historicist by the definition of historicism that Popper uses.  But at least Popper attempts to present an argument that Marxists are historicists by his definition (and massively expands on this argument in The Open Society and Its Enemies).  It's very hard to see how Hitler or Dollfuss could be construed as historicists by this reckoning.  All these distinctions are blurred in a way that is very sloppy and utterly unconvincing.  I could go on, but I fear that I have already spent too much time on this digression.

Anyhow, two years after publishing The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper helped found the Mont Pèlerin Society with Ludwig von Mises, who had been the Chief Economic Advisor to that same Austro-fascist dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss.  They had become friends in Austria, and remained friends throughout the war.  Partly, this was because they were allied in their mutual opposition to Marxism.  If Popper had been staunchly opposed to the "Austro-fascism" that he had lived under, would he be so willing to collaborate with Dollfuss's finance minister?  (Years later, they would have a falling out, because Popper acknowledged that Mises's ideas are unscientific - which is true.  They are unscientific.)

The "paradox of tolerance" is a fairly obvious idea, and Popper wasn't the first to express it.  In fact, it's kind of strange that people tend to call it "Popper's paradox of tolerance," when Popper only made a brief reference to it in a footnote, whereas other writers wrote about it before he did, and much more extensively.  Perhaps the most prominent of these is the Italian political theorist, Gaetano Mosca, who wrote about it in his book The Ruling Class, which was published in Italian in 1896 and translated into English in 1939.  So why don't people call it "Mosca's paradox of tolerance"? Could it be embarrassment over the fact that Mosca was proud to call himself "anti-democratic," and was indeed the founder of what came to be called the "Elitist" movement of political philosophy?  Indeed, similar ideas were expressed by others around this time, like Mosca's friend, Robert Michels, he of the famous "iron law of oligarchy" ("All organizations will inevitably develop into oligarchies in which a small elite holds power") and Vilfredo Pareto, another "Elitist," whose ideas are often seen as a forerunner of Italian fascism.  Or, for that matter, of course, we could talk about Plato himself, who was quite famously opposed to democracy.  Popper was aware of all of this, of course, and in fact he cites Pareto several times in The Open Society and It's Enemies, apparently approvingly.  

We also might think of Walter Lippman, who famously wrote fairly explicitly in his book "Public Opinion" in favor of managed democracy, about the "manufacture of consent" and how necessary it was for elites to manage public opinion to maintain their rule.  Not to mention Friedrich Hayek, the right-wing economist, who was Popper's lifelong friend.

Understanding this context - the tradition of which Popper was a part - helps us to understand Popper's position.  But he also made it clearer, himself: In 1988, The Economist magazine asked Popper to write an article about democracy - was he in favor of democracy?  He obliged them by writing a piece in which he affirmed that he did indeed support democracy - but only if the word "democracy" is completely redefined.  It's a fascinating article - you can read it here.  According to Popper, "democracy" should not mean "rule of the people" (which is, of course, etymologically, what it does mean).  On the contrary, Popper puts forward what he thinks is a much more "realist" concept of democracy.  Though in general a fan of the government of the UK, Popper is opposed to every aspect of their system that goes too far in the direction of the "rule of the people".  He's thinking, in particular, of multi-party democracy, which causes the "responsibility" of the rulers to "decay" - in his opinion, a two party system is enough and there should not be more than two official parties.  Any more than two is dangerously licentious.  By the same token, he is opposed to proportional representation, because it leans too far in the direction of the "rule of the people" and leads to the development of third parties (and fourth parties, and so on).  In short: the hierarchies must be maintained.

So, who, exactly, were the people that Karl Popper considered "intolerant" - and thus dangerous?  It's hard to say, exactly, and Popper didn't make it entirely clear in the text of his famous paragraph.  Yes, Karl Popper argued for the "right to suppress" Marxists, such as the Bolsheviks who had taken power in the U.S.S.R..  But, it would seem, not just them - perhaps also their opponents: the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Trotskyists.  And perhaps also the Social Democrats in his native Austria.  And other leftists.  And many liberals.  And anarchists.  And drug users.  It's interesting that Karl Popper was passionately opposed to television, and wrote a pamphlet entitled "Television: a Bad Teacher."  He also differed with his friend Hayek slightly on one question - whereas Hayek thought people should be allowed to have as many children as they liked, Popper was concerned about overpopulation.  

Then there's the question of religion.  If Popper was opposed to the "closed" society, the society of dogmatism and "taboos" (one of Popper's favorite words), couldn't religions also be considered intolerant?  Some of them, anyway?  Popper was interestingly vague on this question, particularly when it came to Islam.  In fact, interestingly enough, when the famous fatwa went out, demanding the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, Popper was asked to sign a group letter condemning this fatwa.  He refused to sign it, and wrote a confusing letter explaining why.

So which people of the above (communists, fascists, television producers, religious groups) are "the intolerant"?  The more you poke and press at the so-called "paradox of tolerance," the wishier and washier it gets.  Whom, exactly, do we have the "right to suppress"?  It's characteristic that Popper doesn't spell it out in that paragraph, nor did he make it any clearer as the years went on.  For a philosopher who spent decades opining on the famous "demarcation problem" in science, it seems that Popper had another "demarcation problem" - how do we demarcate the line between the "tolerant" people and the "intolerant" people?  

It's almost a problem from set theory: if we must tolerate the tolerant, and not tolerate the intolerant, then anywhere we draw that boundary, we will become intolerant and thus the line must move to include us.  The more you try to pin it down, the more it slips away.  It's analogous to the famous Barber paradox: if, by law, a barber shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves, does he shave himself?  If he doesn't, then by law, he must; if he does, then by law, he must not.  A fun little contradiction - though, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, it's not really a problem but just a silly construction of words: "Noise without meaning," as he put it.

Whenever the issue of the "paradox of tolerance" comes up, I always think of the Church of Scientology, and its notion of a "Suppressive Person" (SP).  The CoS warns us about SPs, and sagely counsels us to stay away from SPs.  Sounds like a good idea.  Who wants to be suppressed by a suppressive person?  Well, the boundaries between the SPs and the non-SPs are rather porous and mushy... eventually it turns out that anyone who is in any way opposed to or even critical of or different from the behavior that is mandated by the principles of the CoS is an SP.  Furthermore it turns out that many members of the CoS are themselves SPs!  Pretty soon everyone is doing everything they can to avoid being branded with the dreaded SP label.  Gradually it becomes clear that the very notion of an SP is just an instrument of control by church leadership - a tactic of manipulation.

People often bring up Popper's paradox of tolerance as if to say, ah yes, but Karl Popper proved long ago that we cannot tolerate the intolerant - case closed - the matter is settled. But the paradox of tolerance should not be taken as an absolute dogma, nor as a proof along the lines of the proof that, given the axioms of Euclidean geometry, it is necessary that the square of the hypotenuse of a triangle is equal to the sum of the squires of its other sides. As we have seen, the paradox of tolerance is not really an argument at all. It's just a brief, parenthetical remark in a footnote to Plato. Popper didn't establish it as logically necessary, nor did he provide any evidence for it - scientific, sociological, psychological, economic, or otherwise.

It is just that - a paradox. A word-game, and nothing more. Popper gave a name to it, but he didn't solve it. Popper didn't prove the impossibility of an open society, nor did he intend to. If anything, the fact that it is a paradox, and presented as a paradox, should make us aware of how unsettled the matter is.

Now, I love paradoxes. I like to think of myself as an adult, but I'll admit that there's still enough of a child in my heart that I can delight in the occasional paradox. But how are we to appreciate this paradox? Compare it to other paradoxes: consider, for instance, Zeno's paradoxes of motion, such as Achilles and the Hare.  Should we conclude, given these paradoxes, that motion is impossible?  No.  Obviously motion exists.  So we are left with a somewhat uncomfortable consequence: that motion exists, yet when we try to think about it, certain paradoxes arise.  It seems there's something wrong with the way we think about motion, but the deficiencies of our thought do not change the reality in the universe.  As Wittgenstein said, "Tautology leaves to reality the whole infinite logical space; contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to reality. Neither of them, therefore, can in any way determine reality."  Similarly, the concept of "tolerance" seems to lead to certain paradoxes.  But does it follow from this that tolerance is impossible?  No.  No more than Zeno's paradox makes motion is impossible.

It's funny that people who bring up the "paradox of tolerance" as if it proved that tolerance is impossible rarely bring up the "paradox of democracy" and try to claim that it proves that democracy is impossible, or to say that the "paradox of freedom" proves that freedom is impossible.

If we strive for maximum tolerance, will logical paradoxes likely arise?  Yes.

Should we strive for maximum tolerance anyway?  Yes.

Will it be difficult?  Undoubtedly.

Is it okay to discuss the paradox of tolerance?  Sure, have fun. 

Will you ever resolve it?  I doubt it. Seems like, probably not.

Will you learn anything from it?  Again, probably not.  Unless it leads you to consider deeper questions, such as the contradictions of capitalism. 

By the way, Karl Popper starts off The Open Society and Its Enemies by saying,

"If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all."

I hope my criticisms of Popper will be taken in the same spirit.  I criticize him because I respect him.  I think Popper should join that vaunted pantheon of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, as a writer worthy of our enthusiastic, critical thought.

Oh, and one more thing: try Wittgenstein's Poker, about the conflict between Wittgenstein and Popper.  It's a fun read.