The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper

Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is a two volumes 700 pages oeuvre aimed at attacking the telelogical historicism Plato, Hegel, and Marx, but also by Aristotle.

The critiques to each of these philosophers followed diverging paths after the publication of The Open Society. As a result of his opinion about Plato, Popper was unable to get a teaching position at the University of Chicago. In fact, Popper was one of the few philosophers in the last 25 centuries that has dared to say that Plato was a racist and totalitarian:

"Plato's idealist historicism ultimately rests not upon a spiritual, but upon a biological basis; it rests upon a kind of metabiology of the race of men. Plato was not only a naturalist who proffered a biological theory of the state, he was also the first to proffer a biological and racial theory of social dynamics, of political history (p. 78)."

As of today, Plato is still widely admired and few people ignore (delibaretly or inadvertently) the dark side of his political theory.

Popper's critique to Aristotle has been mostly forgotten, partly because Aristotle has become irrelevant today. About his thoughts, Popper wrote the following:

"(...) with Aristotle, Platonic philosophy gives up her great aspirations, her claims to power. From this moment, it could continue only as a teaching profession. And since hardly anybody but a feudal lord had the money and the leisure for studying philosophy, all that philosophy could aspire to was to become an annex to the traditional education of a gentelman (p.222)."

Popper loathed Hegel. According to Popper, Hegel was unoriginal, and his style was terrible, and I agree with him on this last point. According to Popper, philosophy lost all usefulness for society after Hegel, and I tend to concur with him on that. In Popper's own words.

"There is nothing in Hegel's writing that has not been said better before him. There is nothing in his apologetic method that is not borrowed from his apologetic forerunners. But he devoted these borrowed thoughts and methods with singleness of purpose, though without a trace of brilliancy, to one aim: to fight against the open society, and thus to serve his employer, Frederick William of Prussia (p. 246)."

Popper's critique of Hegel had a very sad fate: it was perverted. In his controversial book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama basically recycles Hegel (or rather, the interpretation a guy named Kojève makes of Hegel) as a democrat. In most circles, that's the view that prevails of Hegel today. Most circles take Hegel's disastrous prose as a proof of erudition.

Of the four authors analyzed in the book, Marx is the one Popper respects the most. Popper opens his analysis about Marx by saying that "a return to pre-Marxian social science is inconceivable (p. 294)."  However, and in line with the overarching theme of the book, he dismisses Marx's prophetic analysis:

"Marx was, I believe, a false prophet. He was a prophet of the course of history, and his prophecies did not come true; but this is not my main accusation. It is much more important that he misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems (p. 294)."

It must be mentioned that Popper criticized Marx's historicist approach to social sciences while praising his views on 19th century unfettered capitalism. Today, the nuances regarding Marxism are completely lost: in line with other developments of today's society, where space for nuances are almost non-existent, Marx is seen in black or white. Sadly, even people who studied with Popper directly overlooked the positive aspects of Marxism. This is mostly the case of George Soros' Open Society Foundation, which is, according to his founder, based on Popper's thoughts and ideas (it's not, or at least not to the extent Soros claims it is).

Bottom line is that Popper's only approximation to political science (he was a science philosopher and returned to that discipline after the release of The Open Society) has been neglected, forgotten, perverted, or misunderstood....

In any event, I suppose we can't blame Popper for lack of trying...

Comment les démocraties finissent - Jean-François Revel

(…) [L]’ouvrage qui s’achève avait pour objet non de comparer les mérites respectifs du capitalisme et du communisme, de la démocratie et du totalitarisme, mais uniquement de se demander lequel des deux systèmes est en train de faire reculer l’autre.

Pendant toute la Guerre Froide, y compris dans son ouvrage Comment les démocraties finissent, Jean-Francois Revel a soutenu que le communisme finirait par vaincre les démocraties occidentales en raison de leur lâcheté. Le destin démentirait Revel, et en 1991, l’Union Soviétique a cessé d’exister.

Pourtant, la lâcheté des démocraties est toujours là, comme vient de le montrer la réaction des puissances occidentales à la récente annexion de la Crimée par la Russie. Les défauts chez les occidentaux (surtout les européens) que Revel a soulignés tout au long de sa vie, sont toujours là, et on peut même dire que ces défauts ont été magnifiés davantage depuis 1991 : les européens occidentaux (de l’Allemagne jusqu’au Portugal) ont oublié ce qu’est la souffrance, la faim, la guerre, le sacrifice, et l’effort. Par contre, ils ont appris, même s’ils le nient et se prétendent progressistes, ce qu’est la realpolitik : aucun européen n’est aussi stupide pour se battre pour l’Ukraine.

Revel craignait que le communisme ne s’impose en Europe. Aujourd’hui, la Chine est le pays le plus capitaliste du Monde et Poutine est un très bon ami des capitalistes russes.  Le risque n’est plus que le communisme devienne le régime dominateur du monde, mais que les démocraties libérales perdent leur relevance et qu’un capitalisme autoritaire supplante le régime social-démocrate qui, malgré tout, existe aujourd’hui en Europe et reste comme un modèle à imiter.

La tentation totalitaire - Jean-François Revel

Quiconque ne comprend pas le fonctionnement des partis communistes ne comprend rien à la politique moderne.

Le monde actuel évolue vers le socialisme. Le principal obstacle au socialisme est non pas le capitalisme mais le communisme. La société socialiste future ne peut être que planétaire et elle ne se réalisera donc qu’au prix, sinon de la disparition des États-nations, tout au moins de leur subordination à un ordre politique mondial.

Le deuxième paragraphe cité ci-dessus, est le premier de La tentation totalitaire, ouvrage de Jean-François Revel paru en 1976. Ce paragraphe n’est qu’un résumé du livre, mais une prophétie qui s’avèrerait vraie à la fin de la Guerre Froide, quand les idéologies de gauche étaient tellement discréditées que le néolibéralisme Thatchérien et Reaganien  semblaient la seule voie économique et politique. La réalité donnerait la raison à Revel : le vrai socialisme ne peut avoir lieu que dans un système démocratique où les États-nations se dissolvent progressivement : l’Europe d’avant la crise, où l’État providence a atteint toute son ampleur, et où les frontières ont reculé  d’une façon spectaculaire, en est le témoignage.

Tout allait bien selon la carte de route revelienne jusqu’à 2008, lors du collapse des banques d’investissements Américaines et des grandes sociétés financières. L’Europe socialiste a disparu, en grande partie parce que les Allemands en ont marre de financer les pensions des Grecs, mais aussi parce que les banques étaient très à l’aise avec des taux d’imposition très élevées en théorie en retour d’un environnement régulatoire très flou. Aujourd’hui, il est clair que le communisme n’est pas un choix raisonnable, mais il n’est pas évident que le socialisme européen puisse revenir dans le moyen terme : tout au contraire, les masses sans espoir tournent de plus en plus vers ce qu’on appelait « extrême droite »  dans les années 90 et 2000.

Il est difficile à recommander ce livre : d’un côté, les thèses reveliennes sur le socialisme et le communisme sont toujours pertinentes ; d’un autre côté, le livre est tellement centré sur des débats de l’époque (le Chili d’Allende, la transition portugaise, les accords de Helsinki) qu’il peut éloigner les lecteurs modernes. L’irrelevance de La tentation totalitaire aujourd’hui n’est la faute à personne : Jean-François Revel était surtout un polémiste, pas un philosophe ; ses textes étaient censés d'être datés. En tout cas, le vidéo ci-dessous est un bon résumé du livre pour les audiences d’aujourd’hui.

The Catholic Church: A Short History - Hans Küng

Personal politics is of decisive importance for longer-term changes for the Vatican as for any political system.

Quite succinctly, The Catholic Church: A Short History is exactly that: a brief summary of the Catholic Church's History. From the beginning Küng is quite transparent regarding his background and his intentions: he is a catholic trying, at the same time, to demistify Catholicisim and to describe the good things that, despite all its failure, the Catholic Church has given to the West and to the World. Throughout the book, Kung also mentions specific doctrinary and practical aspects in which Catholicism has either misinterpreted Christ's word or has departed from his teaching or from Christianity as practiced by the first communities. For the general public, a selected list of examples provided by Küng is available at the end of this post.

One thing that Küng says loud and clear from the beginning, and that the reader (particularly Catholic readers) should come to terms with is that the Vatican and Catholicism are human creations, hence with errors in design and institutional patches, and hence perfectible. Küng is a reformer of Catholicism, not a rupturist or even a revolutionary. This is actually a good thing: instead of a rosy or manichean picture of History, Küng provides well-balanced opinions and uses concepts such as Realpolitik quite masterfully. He is not naive or condescendent with the Curia's atrocities. As Matthew says that Jesus Christ said , Küng is as shrewd as a snake and as innocent as a dove. 

The book is really well crafted: it is not easy to summarize 2,000 years of History and a prospective (wishful) panorama in less than 300 pages. The book, however, could do a better job trying to explain the theological debates that have ravaged Christianity throughout History. The non-specialist will have to look on Google why not allowing laymen to drink from the chalice during the mass is such a big thing.

And this brings me to my overarching comment of the book. Towards the end, Küng shows his worry about Catholicism survival prospects in the medium term. Quoting declining attendancy rates and trust on religious institutions, he suggests that two reforms can save Catholicism: reform the law of celibacy, a measure that in theory would reduce pedophilia, and reform the episcopal ministry, a rather dry topic for outsiders. Küng is wrong. Catholicism will not disappear: despite all its failure, the longest-living institution of Earth is still the only hope of many dispossesed around the Earth with the exception of Europe, where Welfare State has taken up the social activities formerly performed by the Catholic Church. For some people, especially in the Third World, and thanks partly to the vocation of some priests, the Church is still the patrimony of the poor, a term used extensively by priests during the social revolutions of the mid-19th century.

I always hate when somebody quotes Marx's famous dictum "religion is the opium of the people:" quoters usually just stay with the Jacobin part of Marx's line of thought. But, in what is probably the most scandalous case of decontextualization in History, people forget the first part of the dictum, which explains why the Catholic Church will never disappear, or will morph quite successively into something equally hierarchical with some cosmetic touches: people need religioin. Marx's full quote is:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The biggest problem of this book is that Küng doesn't take into account the specific weight of Catholicism in the developing World -something Küng himself acknowledges and is a. Of course, if one focuses on Europe and even with the United States, Catholicism and religions in general are likely to perish. But if one leaves the old ruminating West, Catholicism is still quite vibrant. It should come as no surprise that Francis, the pope at the time this post was written, comes from Latin America, a place where the Church has traditionally been close to its people, sometimes despite policies coming from the Vatican.

In a recent interview, 12 years after the publication of The Catholic Church, Küng has acknowledged that Francis "embodies my hopes for the Church" (this link reporting the same news is quite hilarious).

Catholicism will be there for a long time. As long as people need a religion, the institutional supply will be there. This doesn't dismiss the value of this book. It is actually a quite good volume and I recommend it for everybody, including the general public.

Specific examples where the Catholic church deviated from the original doctrine or misconceptions about Catholicism as mentioned by Küng

"(...) according to all the evidence Jesus did not found a church in his lifetime."

"The original meaning of ekklesia, 'church', was not a hyperorganization of spiritual functionaries, detached from the concrete assembly. It denoted a community gathering at a particular place at a particular time for a particular action."

"Be it as it may, it is no anachronism to claim that Jesus was anything but the representative of a patriarchal hierarchy."

"[T]oday even Catholic exegetes accept that the famous saying about Peter as the rock on which Jesus will build his church (Matthew 16.18-19; the statement is in the future tense)-of which the other gospels know nothing-is not a saying of the earthly Jesus but was composed after Easter by the Palestinian community, or later by Matthew's community."

"In the earliest church Peter doubtless had a special authority; however, he did not possess it alone, but always collegially with others. He was far removed from being a spiritual monarch, even a sole ruler. There is no trace of any exclusive, quasimonarchical authority as leader (jurisdiction)."

"There is no reliable evidence that Peter was ever in charge of the church of Rome as supreme head or bishop."

"The earliest Christian community did not want in any way to part company with the Jewish community or nation, but to remain integrated into Judaism."

"[I]t must also be said quite inmistakably that the anti-Judaism which can already be found among the Jewish Christians, and which in a lamentable way is already recorded in the gospels of Matthew and John, had its decisive roots in the peersecution of Christians and their exclusion from the syangogue."

"The word 'catholic' (Greek katholikos, 'related to the whole', 'general') is not used anywhere in the New Testament. Nowhere is the 'church' called 'catholic'. The expression 'catholic church' was used for the first time by Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, in his letter to the community in Smyrna."

"Paul was not the real founder of Christianity-though this is constatly asserted by those who will not be taught."

"The presbyteral-episcopal constitution of the church is said to have been instituted by Jesus Christ, even to be a divine institution and therefore unchangeable divine law (iuris divini). However, it is not as simple as that. A careful investigation of the New Testament sources in the last hundred years has shown that this church constitution, centered on the bishop, is by no means directly willed by God or even by Christ, but is the result of a long and problematical historical development. It is human work and therefore in principle can be changed."

The Global Cold War - Odd Arne Westad

The Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means

"Truly seminal", "eye-opening", "sharply observed and deeply researched", "excellent book". Those are some of the definitions provided by some reviews of The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad. For some reason, the book-review industry is full of laudatory expressions, and this blog is not the exception. In this post, and to the extent of my abilities, I will try to write a review without adjectives and completely fact-based:

• Westad does an extracts a lot of information from the Soviet archives. In fact, this was one of the first books ever to do it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the American archives, even though they have clearly been open to the public for longer.
• The first two chapters of the book summarize the founding ideologies of the USA and the USSR and their changes throughout history. I recommend this part to all readers.
• The rest of the book is recommended mostly to European and American readers, who obviously have an Euro-centric view of the Cold War. Enlightened audiences from the developing World (or, as people used to call it before, the Third World) should be well aware that the main scenario of the fight between the USA and the USSR was not Europe, but the rest of the World.
• In a context where the cinicism and simplism of the so-called Realist theory permeates academia, it is quite refreshing to read Westad's argument that USA and USSR interventions throughout their History have been at least partly driven by ideologies. 

No será la Tierra - Jorge Volpi

En alguna ocasión, Luis González de Alba escribió que dejó de leer a Carlos Fuentes cuando éste, a fin de atraer lectores extranjeros, subió sus notas al pie de página al texto principal.

Jorge Volpi, hijo literario de Fuentes, ha empleado la misma “técnica literaria” desde el inicio de su carrera, y en ese sentido se le adelantó a su papá: no tuvo que esperar a que el mercado mexicano de lectores le quedara chico.

En su “trilogía de la maldad”  Volpi mezcla situaciones de vida de personajes históricos no mexicanos con artículos enciclopédicos un poco por encima del nivel de Wikipedia y los adereza con detalles novelescos. Así, Volpi ganó el Biblioteca Breve con En busca de Klingsor, su primera novela, y durante muchos años fue presentado como el primer escritor mexicano que no se miraba el ombligo al momento de redactar desde tiempos de Alfonso Reyes. El truquito le funcionó… hasta que dejó de funcionarle. La fórmula se le agotó, como suele suceder. En su vida post-escritor, Volpi empezó a hacer política y a vivir del presupuesto, dirigiendo la tele pública y fungiendo como agregado cultural en varias embajadas mexicanas hasta que, emulando de nueva cuenta a Fuentes, escribió un artículo en contra de su jefe, Felipe Calderón.

No voy a decir que No será la tierra es un libro aburrido. A mí me entretuvo, a pesar de haber leído otros libros de Volpi, y creo que a los que no han descubierto a este escritor, la fórmula les puede parecer novedosa. Pero No será la tierra tiene limitaciones considerables: al empezar con la conclusión de la historia, se pierde todo elemento sorpresa, que fue lo único novedoso que Volpi le dio a la literatura mexicana con En busca de Klingsor: la dignificación del thriller policiaco. Para ser un libro que trata sobre tres mujeres (o 5, Volpi nunca deja claro quiénes son las protagonistas), hay demasiada testosterona y muy pocos estrógenos. Volpi podrá argumentar que eso se debe a que el narrador es un personaje masculino, pero como quiera que sea el personaje resulta poco creíble: un periodista que conoce la intimidad de varias personas con las que ha hablado, en el mejor de los casos, tres veces en la vida. 

En breve, No será la Tierra tiene muchos problemas de diseño para que merezca ser tomada en serio, pero es muy largo para que se la pueda considerar una novela ligera. Recomiendo este libro con la mínima aprobatoria.

All the Shah's Men - Stephen Kinzer

"it seemed more like a dime novel than historical facts"

-Dwight Eisenhower, on Kermit Roosevelt's account of the 1953 coup in Iran

All the Sha's Men was one of the most successful book in 2003. The Economist picked it as one of its top 10 books on History that year. The quality of the research done in American primary sources (Russians and Iranians obviously denied access to their archives) is undeniable.

There are several comments on this book around the web, from Wikipedia's to The New York Times', where Kinzer works as a foreign correspondent. The most interesting review that I found is the one published by David S. Robarge at the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (the CIA is the agency that orchestrated the coup in Iran in 1953). 

Most reviews agree that Kinzer's book reads more like a novel than a scholar text, and some of them mention that Kinzer goes too far to make a direct causal link between the 1953 coup and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and 9/11 as an extension. 

While most readers will find the thriller-like style of Kinzer appealing, I think it trivializes the personality of the main actors of the plot. The book is also extremely partisan: Mossadegh was the good guy (Kinzer reckons he was a little bit stubborn, but most heroes are, anyway), the British were the bad ones, and Americans were good during Truman's term and became bad during Eisenhower's. That is, in a nutshell, what this book is about. My intuition tells me things had to be more complicated, but I can't get that information from the book. I will have to go to other sources, because Kinzer wastes too many precious paragraphs and pages writing like a novelist. Kinzer's style is excusable and even encouraged in introductory books, but All the Sha's Men is supposed to be an authoritative source on the 1953 coup in Iran. The bottom line is that this is a great book for non-experts; experts probably already read it and dismissed it for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to its style.

As usual, you don't even have to read the book or the reviews to know what it is about. The podcast below is an interview given by Kinzer in February in 2012, when the prospects of a bombing of Iran by Israel or the United States were serious. The fact that Kinzer is considered an authority on Iran 9 years after the first edition of his book is a testimony both of its quality and of the lack of interest to write about Iran from a scholarly perspective. In the interview, Kinzer discusses his book and the policy options of the United States to engage with Iran. 

La revancha del tango - Gotan Project

La revancha del tango combina tres cosas: tango, como su nombre lo indica; música electrónica y beats, y todo el espectro de la ideología comunista argentina; es decir, fragmentos de discursos guevaristas y peronistas.

Para el optimista, esta es una fusión de lo moderno con lo nuevo con cierto toque de lucha de clase latinoamericanista con alcances artísticos -para ponerlo en términos fidelistas- intergalácticos. Para el enemigo del pueblo, los tonos de bar de la elite de La revancha del tango son una muestra de cómo la izquierda sólo quiere convertirse en derecha (cómo olvidar al Ché en los yates de los gusanos días después del triunfo de la Revolución): listillos que quieren adueñarse de los medios de producción en nombre del pueblo mientras toman martinis en sus casas en la playa con sus meretrices, como hacían los oligarcas anteriores. 

En realidad, La revancha del tango fue un disco revolucionario cuando fue lanzado, hace diez años. Después le siguieron gente como Nortec y otros que buscaron mezclar música tradicional con electrónica. Por su culpa, La revancha del tango es valorado desde una perspectiva política y no artística. Peores cosas han pasado.

The Firemen's Ball - Milos Forman

The Firemen's Ball is a 73 minutes Czechoslovakian movie filmed in 1967. The history around this movie  is quite interesting and you can read it in Wikipedia.


The Firemen's Ball is supposed to be a comedy. I did not find it particularly funny, but I do not know if it is me or a generational and cultural change.