Karl Popper on rewrites

One hears very often that a distinction is made between political idealists and political realists.

Political idealists are described by their opponents as men who are unable to face up to political realities, who dream of Utopias, i.e. of ideal societies which exist nowhere and which will hardly ever be realized anywhere. The political idealists describe themselves usually as people who are able to consider an aim towards which mankind should develop, and who are not satisfied merely to struggle along without knowing where they are struggling to and what they are struggling for, but who are rational enough to ask themselves what their aims should be.

Political realists are described by their opponents as opportunists who have no general principle beyond that of proceeding along the line of least resistance, and who are therefore pushed along instead of driving ahead. They themselves of course interpret their doings differently. They pride themselves on facing up to realities and achieving something here and now; they are no dreamers, but men of action, able to reckon withhard facts.

In this lecture, I shall attempt an appraisal of the two tendencies, or more precisely, of the part which, in my opinion, ideas and aims should play in political life, as well as of the part which they should not play. I shall, in the main, distinguish between two attitudes towards this problem, the attitude of the Utopian politician and that of the piecemeal politician; or of the Utopian social engineer and the piecemeal social engineer. The distinction corresponds roughly but not precisely to the more popular distinction between political idealists and realists. I shall attack the Utopian politician and defend the piecemeal politician without however fully defending the attitude usually described as realist.

The Utopian politician may present his case in the following way: Any rational action must aim at some definite end. It is rational only to that extent as it pursues its aim consciously and consistently. The first thing we have to do if we wish to act rationally is therefore to determine our aim. And we must be careful to determine our real, our ultimate ends, and not merely some intermediate or partial ends which are only steps on the way to the ultimate ends, and therefore means rather than ends. This distinction between the ultimate or final aims and the intermediate aims must not be neglected. For if we neglect it, then we are liable to neglect asking ourselves whether these partial or intermediate aims are really such that they will promote our ultimate aims; and failing to ask this question, we must fail to act rationally.

Now if we apply these general principles to the realm of political activity, the Utopian politician argues, then they must lead us to the demand that we must determine our ultimate political aim, the Ideal State, before taking any political action whatever. Only when this ultimate aim is determined, in broad outlines at least, only when we are in the possession of something like a blueprint of the society at which we aim, only then can we consider the best ways and means of its realization; and only then can we begin to draw up a plan for practical action. Thus the preparation of a blueprint of the Ideal State is the necessary preliminary of any practical political move that can be called rational. The politician must work in the manner of an engineer. Political action must become a kind of social engineering.

This is in brief the approach of the Utopian politician or, as we may call him, of the Utopian social engineer. It is convincing and attractive; but this makes it in my opinion only the more dangerous, and its criticism the more imperative.

Before however proceeding to criticize Utopian engineering in detail, I wish to outline the [alternative] approach namely that of the piecemeal politician or, as we may also call him, of the piecemeal social engineer.

It is the approach which I think to be sound. The politician who adopts this method may or may not have a blueprint of society before his mind; he may or may not hope that mankind will one day realize an ideal state, and achieve happiness and perfection on earth. But he will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant, and that every generation of men, and therefore also the living, have a claim; perhaps get so much a claim to be made happy (for there may be no means of making a man happy) but a claim not to be made unhappy, where it can be avoided. They have a claim to be given all possible help, if they suffer. The piecemeal engineer or the piecemeal politician will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good. This difference is far from being merely verbal. In fact, it is most important. I contend that it is the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering; that it is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favourable. And I contend that it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place (Russia included), and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint.

In favour of his method, the piecemeal engineer can claim that a systematic fight against suffering and injustice and war is more likely to be supported by the approval and agreement of a great number of people than a fight for the establishment of some ideal. The existence of social evils, that is to say, of social conditions under which many men are suffering, can be comparatively well established. Those who suffer can judge for themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they would not like to change places. It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge [of] a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale whether it [would] be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this, blueprints for the piecemeal method of social engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health or insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or geting or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult. They are less risky, and for this very reason less controversial. But if it is easier to reach a reasonable agreement about existing evils and the means of combating them than it is about ideal good and the means of its realization, then there is also more hope that by using the piecemeal method we may get over the very greatest practical difficulty of all reasonable political reform, namely, the use of reason instead of passion and violence in executing the programme. There will be a possibility of reaching a reasonable compromise and therefore of achieving the improvement by democratic methods.

As opposed to that, the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship, although perhaps to that of a benevolent dictator. But such a dictatorship is not likely to be a blessing, or to achieve its benevolent aims. One of the difficulties faced by a benevolent dictator is to find out whether the effects of his measures agree with his good intentions. The difficulty arises out of the fact that authoritarianism must discourage criticism; accordingly, the benevolent dictator will not easily hear of complaints regarding the measures he has taken. But without some such check, he can hardly find whether his measures achieve the desired benevolent aim. The situation must become even worse for the Utopian engineer. For the reconstruction of society is a big undertaking which must cause considerable inconvenience to many, and for a considerable span of time. Accordingly, the Utopian engineer will have to be deaf to many complaints; in fact it will be part of his business to suppress unreasonable objections. But with it, he must invariably suppress reasonable criticism also. Another difficulty of Utopian engineering is connected with the problem of the dictator's successor. The very sweep of such a Utopian undertaking makes it improbable that it will realize its ends during the lifetime of one social engineer, or group And if the successors do not pursue the same ideal, then all the sufferings of the people for the sake of the ideal may be in vain.

A generalization of this argument leads to a further criticism of the Utopian approach. This approach, it is clear, can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint, perhaps with certain adjustments, remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual. It is therefore to be expected that ideas and ideals will change. What had appeared the ideal state to the people who made the original blueprint, may not appear so to their successors. If that is granted, then the whole approach breaks down. The method of first establishing an ultimate political aim and then beginning to move towards it is futile if we admit that the aim may be considerably changed during the process of its realization. It may at any moment turn out that the steps so far taken actually lead away from the realization of the new aim. And if we change our direction according to the new aim, then we expose ourselves to the same risk again. In spite of all the sacrifices made, we may never get anywhere at all. Those who prefer one step towards a distant ideal to the realization of a piecemeal compromise should always remember that if the ideal is very distant, it becomes difficult to say whether the step taken was towards or away from it. This is especially so if the course should proceed by zigzag steps (or in the jargon of the philosopher Hegel, 'dialectically') or if it is not clearly planned at all.

We see now that the Utopian approach can be saved only by the belief in one absolute and unchanging Ideal State, together with two further assumptions, namely (a) that there are rational methods to determine once and for ever what this aim is, and (b) what the best means of its realization are. Only such far-reaching assumptions could prevent us from declaring the Utopian method to be utterly futile. And in fact, these assumptions were made by some politicians, first of all by the great philosopher and Utopianist, Plato. But even Plato might have doubted that there is a rational method for determining the ultimate aim; for he appealed to the elect few, who can see the ideal by a kind of intuition. This means that any difference of opinion between the Utopian engineers must lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence. If any progress in any definite direction is made at all, then it is made in spite of the Utopian method adopted, not because of it. The success may be due for instance, to the excellence of the leaders; but we must never forget that excellent leaders cannot be procured by rational methods, but only by luck.

It is important to understand this criticism properly. I do not criticize the ideal by claiming that an ideal can never be realized, that it must always remain a Utopia. This would not be a valid criticism, for many things have been realized which have once been dogmatically declared to be unrealizable, for instance, the establishment of institutions for securing civil peace, i.e. for the prevention of crime within the state; and I think that for instance, the establishment of corresponding institutions for the prevention of international crime, i.e. armed aggression or blackmail, though often branded as Utopian, is not even a very difficult problem. What I criticize under the name Utopianism is the view that we must undertake the reconstruction of society as a whole, i.e. [that we must undertake] very sweeping changes whose practical consequences are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences. It claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim. We cannot possess such knowledge since we have insufficient practical experience in this kind of planning, and knowledge of facts must be based on experience. At present, the sociological knowledge necessary for large-scale engineering is simply non-existent.

In view of this criticism, the Utopian engineer is likely to grant the need for practical experience, and for a social technology based on practical experiences. But he will argue that we shall never know more about these matters if we recoil from making social experiments which alone can furnish us with the practical experience needed. And he might add that Utopian engineering is nothing but the application of the experimental method to society. Experiments cannot be carried out without involving sweeping changes. They must be on a large scale, owing to the peculiar character of modern society with its great masses of people. An experiment in socialism for instance if confined to a factory, or to a village, or even to a district, would never give us the kind of realistic information most urgently needed.

Such arguments in favour of Utopian engineering exhibit an important prejudice which is as widely held as it is untenable, namely the prejudice that social experiments must be on a 'large scale', that they must involve the whole of society if they are to be carried out under realistic conditions. But piecemeal experiments can be carried out under realistic conditions, in the midst of society, in spite of being on a 'small scale', that is to say, without revolutionizing the whole of society. In fact, we are making such experiments all the time. The introduction of a new kind of life-insurance, of a new kind of taxation, of a new penal reform, are all social experiments which have their repercussions through the whole of society without re-modelling society as a whole. Every man who opens a new shop, or who reserves a ticket for the theatre, is carrying out a kind of social experiment on a small scale; and all our knowledge of social conditions is based on experience gained by making experiments of this kind. The Utopian engineer we are combating is right when he stresses that an experiment in socialism would be of little value if carried out under laboratory conditions, for instance, in an isolated village, since what we want to know is how things work out in society under normal social conditions. But this very example shows where the prejudice of the Utopian engineer lies. He is convinced that we must recast the whole structure of society, when we experiment with it; and he can therefore conceive a more modest experiment only as one that recasts the whole structure of a small society. But the kind of experiment from which we can learn most is the alteration of one social institution at a time. For only in this way can we learn how to fit institutions into the framework of other institutions, and how to adjust them so that they work according to our intentions. And only in this way can we make mistakes, and learn from our mistakes, without risking repercussions of a gravity that must endanger the will to future reforms. Furthermore, the Utopian method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which countless sacrifices have been made. Powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. All this does not contribute to the rationality nor to the scientific value, of the experiment. But the piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments. (In fact, it might lead to the happy situation where politicians begin to look out for their own mistakes instead of trying to explain them away and to prove that they have always been right. This would mean the introduction of scientific method into politics, since the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes.)

These views can be corroborated, I believe, by comparing social and, for instance, mechanical engineering. The Utopian engineer will of course claim that the mechanical engineer plans even very complicated machinery as a whole, and that his blueprints may cover, and plan beforehand, not only a certain kind of machinery, but even the whole factory which produces this machinery. My reply would be that he can do all this because he has sufficient experience, i.e. because he has made all kinds of mistakes already. This experience he has gained by applying a piecemeal method. His new machinery is the result of a great many small improvements. He has had a model first, and only after a great number of piecemeal adjustments to its various parts did he proceed to a stage where he could draw up his final plans for the production. Similarly, his plan for the production of his machine incorporates a great number of experiences, namely, of piecemeal improvements made in older factories. The wholesale or large-scale method works only where the piecemeal method has first furnished us with a great number of detailed experiences, and even then only within the realm of these experiences. A manufacturer will hardly proceed to the production of a new engine on the basis of a blueprint alone, even if it were drawn by the greatest expert, without first making a model and 'developing' it up by little adjustments as far as possible.

Thus the Utopian approach turns out to be untenable and irrational although it poses as the only rational approach to the problem. It forgets that in all matters concerning the world we live in, we can only learn by trial and error, by making mistakes and improvements; we can never rely on inspiration, although inspirations may be most valuable as long as they can be checked by experience. Accordingly, it is not reasonable to assume that a complete reconstruction of our social world would lead at once to a workable system. Rather we should expect that, owing to lack of experience, many mistakes would be made, which could only be eliminated by a long and laborious process of improvement; in other words, by that rational method of piecemeal engineering whose application we advocate. But those who dislike this method as insufficiently radical would have again to wipe out their freshly constructed society, and to start anew. And since the new start, for the same reasons, would not lead to perfection either, they would have to repeat this process without ever reaching anything. Those who admit this and are prepared to adopt our more modest method of piecemeal improvements, but only after the first Utopian attempt has been made, can hardly escape the criticism that their first sweeping and publicly violent measures were quite unnecessary. The whole approach of Utopianism arises, I believe, from the failure of realizing that we cannot make heaven on earth with one stroke of a dictator's pen, and that we must be satisfied if we succeed in making a little less terrible and a little less unjust in every generation. This does not mean that we cannot achieve a great deal in this way; much has been achieved in the last hundred years, and much more could be achieved by our own generation, if we only give up dreaming about far ideals, and fighting religious wars for Utopian blueprints. Instead, we should try to look upon our most pressing real problems, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer injustice; avoiding unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, i.e. blackmail and war incited by irresponsible and megalomaniac tyrants.