The Society Most Conducive to Problem Solving: Karl Popper and Piecemeal Social Engineering

In his major work in social theory, The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper (1902-1994) presented his idea of the open society and the process of social reform that he called “piecemeal social engineering.” Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) rightly criticized its primarily interventionist thrust but failed to endorse the portion that recognized market processes as participants. That failure, along with Popper’s generally interventionist orientation, led to a general rejection of his ideas on society by economists and social philosophers whose thinking led them to non-interventionist conclusions. We endeavor to rectify Hayek’s oversight and use it as an opening to a wider-ranging criticism of Popper’s interventionism based upon his own work on the evolution of knowledge. We conclude that the society most conducive to problem solving would not look like the one Popper imagined but would conform to his theory of knowledge generation.