1 Popper's alleged positivism stems in part from the famous confrontation between Adorno and Habermas, on one side, and Popper and Albert, Hans, on the other, over the epistemological status of the social sciences. The contributions to this debate were collected under the somewhat misleading title of The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1976)Google Scholar, originally published as Adorno, T. W., Albert, H., Habermas, J., Popper, K. R., etal., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1969).Google Scholar See also note 24 below.

2 Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (rev. ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1968).Google Scholar

3 Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (5th ed., rev.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

4 For an analysis of Popper's liberalism, see Ryan, Alan, “Popper and Liberalism,” in Currie, G. and Musgrave, A. (eds.), Popper and the Human Sciences (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 89–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 These and other arguments of immediate relevance for social and political philosophy—the rationality principle and the critique of historicism—are now conveniently accessible as Part IV of Miller, David (ed.), Popper Selections (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar together with some of Popper's most important writings in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of science and metaphysics.

6 Dunn, John, in Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, for example, writes that the conception set out by Popper and F. A. Hayek nonetheless is “[t]he nearest to a comprehensive liberal theory at present available” (49n). Given the state of contemporary liberal theory, and political theory more generally, this alone would seem to be sufficient reason to re-examine Popper's conception.

7 Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, 120.

8 Ibid., 121.

9 Ibid., 121–22.

10 Ibid., 122.

11 The assumption of class domination has been somewhat relaxed in recent Marxist thought as is shown by the conceptual shift, following Gramsci, from class domination to class hegemony. What would be needed, however, is a conceptual break which hegemony as a more subtle form of domination does not achieve. Of course, it might be argued that the focus on class struggle in Marxist analysis demonstrates that domination is never complete. But the tacit assumption that the end of class struggle is socialism and absolute working-class power indicates that limitations on political power are contingent and transitory, that is, they are political rather than limitations in principle.

12 Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, 123.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 123.

15 Ibid., 125.

16 Ibid., 124; emphasis in the original.

17 Ibid., 265–66.

18 There is a third objection. Sovereignty, one might contend, means absolute sovereignty, or else it does not make any sense. The same would then have to be said about freedom, tolerance and democracy. Just as it is quite meaningful to speak of limited freedom, limited tolerance and limited majority rule, it is quite useful to speak of limited sovereignty. However, as the examples from the history of political theory referred to below will show, even the principle of unlimited sovereignty is not necessarily inconsistent with a theory (and practice) of institutional control, whereas theories of limited or mixed sovereignty are in fact seriously defective. See especially note 53 below.

19 Popper, Karl, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 5.Google Scholar

20 The first statement of Popper's solution to the problem of knowledge is published as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1979) on the basis of manuscripts from the years 1930–1933. The Logic of Scientific Discovery was a severely abridged version of this work which excluded large sections containing many of the ideas which Popper developed only much later. For the reader unfamiliar with Popper's solution to the so-called problem of induction, the relevant sections in Miller's Popper Selections can provide a useful introduction.

21 On the justificationist metacontext, see Bartley, William Warren III, The Retreat to Commitment (2nd rev. ed.; Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 1984), 171–77, 186–87.Google Scholar

22 See especially Popper's critique of the sociology of knowledge in Open Society, vol. 2, 212–23.

23 Thus, while an observed fact, for example, may be said to refute conclusively an hypothesis, the observation statement itself can be subject to a variety of criticisms.

24 In his early writings, Popper “implicitly tends to identify the demarcation between science and non-science with the demarcation between good and bad… [theories].” Thus, as Bartley (Retreat to Commitment, 205) further explains, Popper, , in his most extreme statement “denies that untestable or unfalsifiable theories even speak about reality.” Popper himself, in Objective Knowledge (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972)Google Scholar, writes with respect to his early work: “In those days I identified wrongly the limits of science with those of arguability. I later changed my mind and argued that non-testable (i.e. irrefutable) metaphysical theories may be rationally arguable” (40n). Further on this, see especially chapters 8 and 10 in his Conjectures and Refutations as well as section 15 of his Realism and the Aim of Science, vol. 1 of Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, ed. by Bartley, W. W. III (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983).Google Scholar

25 Bartley, Retreat to Commitment, 127; emphasis in the original.

26 See Ibid., 202.

27 Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 199; emphasis added.

28 Ibid., 159.

29 The assumption here is not that these standard or perennial problems of political theory are necessarily more important than those of institutional control or other conceivable problems, for example, political, social and economic equality, or group (collective) rights versus individual rights. But I will focus on the former because they were two fundamental problems which the theory of sovereignty addressed.

30 The best example is perhaps the so-called international order where war and instability are the result not of the abuse of power by the sovereign ruler but of the absence of such power, that is, the lack of a stable political order.

31 One contemporary example of the rejection of liberal values which holds clear implications for the problems of legitimacy and political order is the various Islamic revolutions and similarly inspired political movements. But even within a catalogue of liberal values broadly conceived that would include the values of social and economic justice, their relative ordering as well as mutual inconsistencies, or the need for trade-offs between them, illustrates that the legitimacy of a given order always remains problematic.

32 See Albert, Traktat über rationale Praxis, 177–78.

33 This formulation has the advantage of not disputing the general or transhistorical character of political theories or any of their elements in principle. By emphasizing the importance of the problem situation at hand, it is possible to avoid both radical relativist and absolutist positions while benefiting from the theoretical insights considered fundamental by each. The fact that many political theorists have made universal claims for their doctrines need not disturb us. There is no reason why we could not read them as making more or less general and context-bound, though not universal claims. At least in this respect we will not lose anything of significance by refusing to understand their theories as they were understood by their authors.

34 Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, 122.

35 “Situational logic” is one of the many most valuable methodological suggestions Popper has made for social science. See his Open Society, vol. 2, chap. 14, as well as “The Rationality Principle,” published for the first time in English in Miller, Popper Selections, 357–65.

36 Hinsley, F. H., Sovereignty (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 100.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 102–03, 106.

38 One of the central problems of political theory in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century was the relationship between religious and secular powers, that is, the demarcation of their respective domains of authority. It was among the central problems of Thomas Aquinas, Dante and Marsilius.

39 Hinsley, Sovereignty, 109–10.

40 Ibid., 115.

41 Another important reason, of course, was that Hobbes, unlike Machiavelli, had completed the conceptual breakthrough towards a theory of the impersonal sovereign state. Machiavelli's conception of the state was still based on the medieval dualism, that is, political power was held either by the Prince or by the People (republican government), or through an institutional power-sharing based on the classical mixed constitution. See, for example, Mansfield, Harvey C., “On the Impersonality of the Modern State: A Comment on Machiavelli's Use of ‘Stato,’;“ American Political Science Review 77 (1983), 855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 The notion of sovereignty was first formulated under the Roman Empire from the first century A.D. “in much the same way and by much the same process.” See Hinsley, Sovereignty, 42–44.

43 On this paradox and its resolution through a theory of popular sovereignty, see comments on Locke below.

44 Quaritsch, Helmut, Staat und Souveränität (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1970), 269.Google Scholar

45 Franklin, Julian H., Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 108.Google Scholar

46 Hinsley, Sovereignty, 124.

47 Bodin did address the question of tyranny explicitly, and came to the conclusion that while some minor forms of resistance to the sovereign were admissible, removal or tyrannicide were not. See Quaritsch, Staat und Souveränität, 319–33.

48 Hinsley, Sovereignty, 122–23.

49 Quaritsch, Staat und Souveränität, 512.

50 “It remained possible for subsequent writers to obscure his doctrine by misusing monarchical sovereignty as the justification of absolutism—or by the populist arguments which they brought against this misuse…. But it was not for nothing that subsequent theorists would be unable to ignore the notion of sovereignty or to alter Bodin's statement of it to any significant extent—that the further history of the concept… is a history of its use and misuse in varying political conditions and not of restatements of it in different or novel terms” (Hinsley, Sovereignty, 124–25).

51 As such, it does not make the claim that political power is in fact sovereign in the empirical sense which Popper has criticized (see above)—it only means that there can be no rightful or legitimate claims for political power that do not originate in and are sanctioned by the sovereign.

52 Evidence for this claim from the history of political theory will be presented below.

53 However, Bodin's reformulation of the problem of order (that is, his conception of absolute sovereignty) did not become prevalent until the end of the seventeenth century; prior to that time, conceptions of limited or double sovereignty were still widely advocated. As Hinsley has pointed out, “It was clear at the time, on the other hand, that this mixed government and similar compromise theories failed to check dissension, as they failed to avert the Civil War. And it is now clear that this was because they merely extended the dualism which it was the aim of the concept of sovereignty to overcome—merely shifted the conflict between dualism and the idea of sovereignty—by seeking to split or subdivide the rulership itself when it was in practice impossible to limit or subdivide the government power that was coming to be seen as sovereign power” (Sovereignty, 138).

54 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar See also Macpherson's introduction to Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. by Macpherson, C. B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), esp. 9–63.Google Scholar

55 See in particular Letwin, William, “The Economic Foundations of Hobbes’ Politics,” in Cranston, Maurice and Peters, Richard S. (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), 133–64Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’ Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9 (1966), 286–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Keith, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’ Political Thought,” in Brown, K. C. (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 185–236Google Scholar; Wood, Neal, “Hobbes and the Crisis of the Aristocracy,” History of Political Thought 1 (1980), 437–52.Google Scholar

56 Writers like Anthony Ascham, John Rockett and Henry Parker. See Hinsley, Sovereignty, 141.

57 Ibid.

58 Locke's conception of sovereignty, as J. H. Franklin has shown, was already worked out by George Lawson, a political moderate writing in the later Interregnum. See Franklin, Julian H., John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 116.

60 Hinsley, Sovereignty, 146.

61 Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, 124.

62 Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, 122.

63 Of course Locke's comprehensive theory of sovereignty has not always been fully understood, nor has it gone unchallenged. “[T]he abstract concept of the state as a moral person, and even the doctrine of sovereignty itself, were blunted and obscured when Montesquieu, like the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution after him, mistook the English principle of mixed government, based on the separation of different government powers, to be a doctrine resulting from and justifying the deliberate division of sovereignty itself among several independent owners” (Hinsley, Sovereignty, 152). Rousseau rejected not only any division of sovereign power but also any constitutionalist elements such as the division of powers or representation. “Reversing Hobbes's thesis, in which the state dominated the community which created it while remaining separate from it, he allowed the community to swallow up the state—and left the community with no organ capable of exercising power” (Ibid., 155).

64 The problem of order is raised in some conservative attacks on liberal democracy which, while explicitly bemoaning the demise of civic and moral virtues, implicitly consider the liberal political order as the fundamental problem. For a recent collection of contributions to this debate, see Deutsch, Kenneth L. and Soffer, Walter (eds.), The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).Google Scholar There is a large and growing literature on the crisis of capitalist democracies and the welfare state. For a recent contribution that is an excellent attempt to define the present problem situation for political theory, see Offe, Claus, “Democracy against the Welfare State? Structural Foundations of Neoconservative Political Opportunities,” Political Theory 15 (1987), 501–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 This is not to say that epistemological assumptions may not affect substantive political doctrines, or, as Hume held, that philosophical and political ideas are independent. On this general problem, see Watkins, J. W. N., “Epistemology and Politics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 58 (1958), 79–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 See, among others, Dunn, Modern Political Theory; Wallach, John R., “Liberals, Communitarians, and the Tasks of Political Theory,” Political Theory 15 (1987), 581–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gunnell, John G., “In Search of the Political Object: Beyond Methodology and Transcendentalism,” in Nelson, John S. (ed.), What Should Political Theory Be Now? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 25–52.Google Scholar