Si vis pacem, para bellum? Plato, Kant and Popper

Abstract

In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) Popper (in)famously depicted Plato as a totalitarian thinker, a militarist and a ‹historicist›. Popper’s aim was not a balanced interpretation of Plato’s political thought. Instead, he was «bent on destroying what is in my [Popper’s] opinion mischievous in this philosophy». Furthermore, Popper compared Plato unfavourably with Kant. This paper brings these three authors in conversation concerning the core conceptual opposites in Popper’s book: war and peace, totalitarianism and individualism, history and teleology. The paper shows that Plato was not a militarist, that he tried to end war and violence by harmonizing political antagonism in an institutionalized, balanced concord of potentially conflicting forces within and between individuals and communities, and that this approach fits Kant’s – teleological – perspective on the genealogy of morals. The paper argues that, held to Popper’s standards, Kant was a ‹historicist› and that, within the framework of his historical perspective, Plato’s answer to war and violence can be seen as a crucial stage in the dialectical development, through the workings of the «unsocial sociability» of humankind, towards ever more efficient institutional safeguards against the conflicts ensuing from the innate social ambivalence of the species. The paper lays the groundwork for a further exploration of the place of friendship, kinship and well-tempered concord in Plato’s political philosophy.