{"id":58410,"date":"2026-01-31T01:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=58410"},"modified":"2026-01-30T07:31:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T12:31:05","slug":"qotd-liberal-principles-according-to-karl-popper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/01\/31\/qotd-liberal-principles-according-to-karl-popper\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Liberal principles according to Karl Popper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As usual when Popper addressed a meeting, his aim was to challenge and provoke thought, rather than simply endorsing the assumptions that he shared with his audience. […] It may help to start with a summary of the liberal principles that Popper spelled out in section 3. This will be helpful for a general readership (unlike the Mont Pelerin meeting) where there are likely to be many people who do not hold non-socialist liberal principles and some who are not be clear about what these principles are.<\/p>\n

(1) The state is a necessary evil and its powers should be kept to the minimum that is necessary.<\/p>\n

(2) A democracy is a state where the government can be changed without bloodshed.<\/p>\n

(3) Democracy cannot confer benefits on people. “Democracy provides no more than a framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organised and coherent way.”<\/p>\n

(4) Democracy does not mean that the majority is right.<\/p>\n

(5) Institutions need to be tempered and supported by traditions.<\/p>\n

(6) There is no Liberal Utopia. There are always problems, conflicts of interests, choices to be made between the lesser of evils.<\/p>\n

(7) Liberalism is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is about modifying or changing institutions and traditions rather than wholesale replacement of the existing order. The exception to this is when a tyranny is in place, that is a government that can only be changed by violence and bloodshed.<\/p>\n

(8) The importance of the moral framework.<\/p>\n

“Among the traditions that we must count as the most important is what we may call the ‘moral framework’ (corresponding to the institutional ‘legal framework’) of a society. This incorporates the society’s traditional sense of justice or fairness, or the degree of moral sensitivity that it has reached … Nothing is more dangerous than the destruction of this traditional framework. (Its destruction was consciously aimed at by Nazism.)”<\/p>\n

Rafe Champion, “Summary and commentary on a paper on public opinion and liberal principles delivered by Popper to the Mont Pelerin Society”<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As usual when Popper addressed a meeting, his aim was to challenge and provoke thought, rather than simply endorsing the assumptions that he shared with his audience. […] It may help to start with a summary of the liberal principles that Popper spelled out in section 3. This will be helpful for a general readership […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,10,41],"tags":[766],"class_list":["post-58410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-democracy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fc6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100617,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58410\/revisions\/100617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}