Vote of Thanks

Abstract

Maggie Thatcher claimed that it was she who inaugurated the policies which led to the liberation of eastern Europe from Communist tyranny. As usual, Maggie Thatcher was wrong.

The first step towards that liberation was taken here in New Zealand in the early forties, when Karl Popper wrote his The Open Society and its Enemies, in Christchurch.

In order to understand the impact of that book - the long term effects of which Mr Have! has stressed and explained we have to look back. In the thirties, open societies and the practice of democracy were not held in high esteem. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that at that time even the best people were hoping that democracy would be replaced by a form of government envisaged by Plato - where Platonic justice, presided over by omnipotent and omniscient guardians, would reign supreme. People on the left harboured such hopes because they took it that democracy was nothing more than a cloak which allowed the rich to exploit the poor; and people on the right harboured such hopes because they found that democracy allowed too much power to the disorderly mob. It was to combat these influences and that unholy alliance between the right and the left that Popper set out to expose the fatal flaws in Plato's political thought. Plato had always occupied high moral ground through his promise to replace the idiocies of all forms of government by the rule of justice. Popper not only demonstrated the impossibility of establishing justice by government decree because nobody can be omniscient, but also showed that Plato had been writing in bad faith.