alt Hacker NewsHmm, was the rise of the Third Reich because a far-right and social democratic regime had liquidated the entirety of the militant left wing in Germany? Was it because of the vulnerabilities of parliamentary democracies that Carl Schmitt identified and helped the nascent Nazi movement exploit? Was it because the much lauded dialectical progression towards societies of greater freedom, touted by the German idealists, instead led to a country ravaged by war, leaving disillusionment and a moral void that a strongman with some convenient scapegoats could exploit?
No! Of course it was because Plato's authoritarian Republic ideas because they, with the most surface level interpretation, share the concept of class collaboration with fascism.
Popper has many good ideas but I think this was not one of them. The rise of fascism was incredibly historically contingent. It was a black swan event, and one of the defining characteristics of such events is that people always write flimsy narratives to explain them with the benefit of hindsight.
> The rise of fascism...was a black swan event
This is a very bold claim, and many (including myself) argue that authoritarianism and many things identified fascist are the inevitable result of liberal democracy. Capitalism cannibalizing itself, etc etc, which again many would argue is also inevitable. Marx outlines the inevitable decline of profit that drives this phenomenon in Volume III of Capital, but it is also a viewpoint shared by Adam Smith himself, John Stuart Mills, etc etc. Schumpeter also relies on it heavily in his analysis of the role of private property in driving market processes.
As profits inevitably decline, either capital will inevitably seize control of the state (dictatorship of capital) or the people do (dictatorship of the proletariat). Their interests are inherently at odds, and market forces ensures that this contradiction must be resolved. Inevitably.