From Karl Popper to Karl Rove and Back

It's always, as Karl Popper put it, theory laden.

Destroy that and you destroy the hallmarks of liberal order. As the great political philosopher Karl Popper argued, the only thing that we should not tolerate in an open society is intolerance.

Popper failed to recognize that in democratic politics, gathering public support takes prece dence over the pursuit of truth. In other areas, such as science and industry, the impulse to impose one s views on the world encounters the resistance of external reality.

He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescence being called Popper, one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty.

But there was always more to Schmidt s outlook on the world As a son of Germany s largest port city, he was a committed internationalist, genuinely interested in what lay beyond our borders. As a student of Popper, and carrying the memories and scars of the catastrophe of the Nazi years, he was acutely aware throughout his life of both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of our open societies.

The integration process was spearheaded by a small group of farsighted statesmen who subscribed to open society principles and practiced what Karl Popper called piecemeal social engineering. They recognized that perfection is unattainable so they set limited objectives and firm timelines and then mobilized the political will for a small step forward, knowing full well that when they achieved it, its inadequacy would become apparent, requiring further steps.