Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 23:06:40 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Re: Primacy of practice, sophistry, and other fun stuff


I don't know about Kuhn, but anybody of intellectual integrity with a
reasonable familiarity with Hegel and Marx who reads The Open Society
and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism could scarcely doubt that
Popper was a cold war warrior. He is not only sly, he is dishonest,
deliberately suppressing key words and omitting context in quotes to
suit his cold warrior distortions and travesties. His characteristic
method is to set up a scarecrow and demolish it as if it were the real
thing. To spring to his defence on this issue in the current context can
only mean to defend the totalitarian commercialism (Collier) that Popper
himself promoted and which is now being imposed on the world by all
force necessary. (The very skies over London have been emptied for the
god of totalitarian commercialism to arrive as I type this...)

Mervyn

 steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk writes
>James
>
>The fifties cold warrior labelling of Popper has been challenged in very
>interesting ways by Steve Fuller just recently in his book Kuhn vs Popper.
>As Fuller points out it is Kuhn who is in the pay of the coldwar warriors...
>
>(this is not to disagree or comment on the thrust of the below - merely to
>spring to the defence of popper...)
>
>regards
>sdv
>
>> Hi Carroll
>>
>> Your punchline was strong -- that the purpose of reading Plato's
>> Republic was to understand The Enemy.  But, only one? Why is his name
>> on Lenin's tomb?  Your approach calls to mind the Fifties cold warrior
>> Sir Karl Popper's *Open Society and Its Enemies*, after which George
>> Soros named his foundation. Slyly, Sir Karl manages to suggest that
>> Plato's target is workers who must be kept in their place, whereas his
>> real target (see the Gorgias) is the unscrupulous Nietzschean rich who
>> want to exploit and rule.
>>
>> It is nearly always forgotten that the society of Plato's first choice
>> is a communist one, and that the rest of the argument is about a
>> second-best society. And even the second-best society is not a class
>> society in Marx's sense, in that the philosopher rulers do not
>> appropriate the surplus, but live a frugal life.
>>
>> I suppose the jury is out on whether Plato meant by "gennaion pseudos"
>> Big or Noble Lie, or both, but the myth of noble and base metals in the
>> soul is an answer to the problem of legitimising the rule of
>> reason, and defending it against the power of wealth. Lenin had the
>> same problem. It's quite a problem!
>>
>> James
>>
>> --



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