Karl Popper
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 121st anniversary of the birth of Karl Popper (28 July 1902–17 September 1994), who was born in Vienna on this date in 1902.
To what I have called the non-philosophies of history — those of Karl Löwith, Simone Weil, Descartes, and Jacob Burckhardt — we may contrast the activist philosophies of history, which see something wrong in our understanding of history that fatally compromises human action in history, and therefore such an understanding of history calls for change. Popper’s philosophy of history is an activist philosophy of history in this way. His primary contribution to the philosophy of history, The Poverty of Historicism, is an attack on historicism, which Popper believes to have pernicious consequences for understanding the place of humanity in history.
Popper originally published The Poverty of Historicisim in 1957; he had earlier published The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945, and in the penultimate paragraph of The Poverty of Historicism a footnote directs us to The Open Society and Its Enemies:
“See my book The Open Society and Its Enemies… where it is argued that it is the loss of the unchanging world of a primitive closed society which is, in part, responsible for the strain of civilization, and for the ready acceptance of the false comforts of totalitarianism and of historicism.”
In the Preface to The Povery of Historicism, Popper writes of his ongoing efforts not only to criticize historicism, but to refute it:
“I tried to show, in ‘The Poverty of Historicism,’ that historicism is a poor method — a method which does not bear any fruit. But I did not actually refute historicism.Since then, I have succeeded in giving a refutation of historicism: I have shown that, for strictly logical reasons, it is impossible for us to predict the future course of history.The argument is contained in a paper published in 1950, entitled ‘Indeterminism in Classical Physics and in Quantum Physics’; but I am no longer satisfied with this paper. A more satisfactory treatment will be found in a chapter on Indeterminism which is part of the Postscript: After Twenty Years, appended to the new edition of my Logic of Scientific Discovery.”
In this way we can see that The Poverty of Historicism is part of Popper’s overall philosophical project, and not an isolated foray into the philosophy of history. So what exactly is the historicism that constituted such a threat according to Popper? Here is how Popper defined historicism:
“I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history.”
However, E. H. Carr in his well-known study What is history? has this to say of Popper’s understanding of historicism:
“…Professor Popper uses ‘historicism’ as a catch-all for any opinion about history which he dislikes, including some which seem to me sound and others which are, I suspect, held by no serious writer today.”
This isn’t entirely fair, as it implies that Popper was evasive in his definition of historicism, whereas we can find passages in which he is pretty clear about his understanding of it. But Carr is right that few others seem to share Popper’s understanding of historicism. Here, for example, is Hans Meyerhoff, from his The Philosophy of History in Our Time, on historicism:
“The basic thesis of historicism is quite simple: The subject matter of history is human life in its totality and multiplicity. It is the historian’s aim to portray the bewildering, unsystematic variety of historical forms — people, nations, cultures, customs, institutions, songs, myths, and thoughts — in their unique, living expressions and in the process of continuous growth and transformation.”
Notice that there is nothing here on prediction, patterns, or laws. For the voice of philosophical officialdom, here are a couple of characterizations of historicism from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Historicism is an insistence on the historicity of all knowledge and cognition, and on the radical segregation of human from natural history. It is intended as a critique of the normative, allegedly anti-historical, epistemologies of Enlightenment thought, expressly that of Kant.”
…and…
“…a radical shift away from Enlightenment understandings of history.”
Again, we note that absence of properties that Popper assigned to historicism, but let us set this aside, allowing historicism to be Popper’s bête noire, and see why Popper attacks and, and whether these attacks are justified. But I’m going to start with what I personally find most interesting in Popper’s critique of historicism, and that is is opposition to the idea of what he calls theoretical history:
“…we must reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.”
We can abbreviate the above to the idea that history cannot be a predictive science, but there are three ideas in this brief passage that are worth distinguishing:
- An historical social science cannot correspond to theoretical physics
- There can be no scientific theory of historical development
- A theoretical scientific history could be the basis of historical prediction
Are these the same idea differently expressed, or would it be possible to hold some or all of these ideas in isolation from the others? That is to say, is it possible that there would be a science of history that does not correspond to theoretical physics? Is it possible that a scientific theory of historical development might not be the basis of historical prediction? Is it possible that a predictive science of history, whether or not that science corresponded with to theoretical physics? All of these problems are familiar from other contexts, except that Popper is the exception among philosophers of history in singling out the possibility of a theoretical science of history for special criticism. What would a theoretical science of history look like, and are there any non-theoretical sciences that could contrast to a theoretical science? Popper makes a few more references to theoretical history in The Poverty of Historicism:
“…the making and testing of large-scale historical forecasts is the task of sociology as seen by historicism. In brief, the historicist claims that sociology is theoretical history.”
And this:
“…sociology, to the historicist, is theoretical history. Its scientific forecasts must be based on laws, and since they are historical forecasts, forecasts of social change, they must be based on historical laws.”
The most detailed passage in which he mentions theoretical history is this:
“Social science is nothing but history: this is the thesis. Not, however, history in the traditional sense of a mere chronicle of historical facts. The kind of history with which historicists wish to identify sociology looks not only backwards to the past but also forwards to the future. It is the study of the operative forces and, above all, of the laws of social development. Accordingly, it could be described as historical theory, or as theoretical history, since the only universally valid social laws have been identified as historical laws. They must be laws of process, of change, of development — not the pseudo-laws of apparent constancies or uniformities. According to historicists, sociologists must try to get a general idea of the broad trends in accordance with which social structures change. But besides this, they should try to understand the causes of this process, the working of the forces responsible for change. They should try to formulate hypotheses about general trends underlying social development, in order that men may adjust themselves to impending changes by deducing prophecies from these laws.”
So Popper’s rejection of the very possibility of a theoretical history is predicated upon the rational reconstruction of history as a kind of sociology, or, if you like, a reconstrual of sociology as an approach to history. According to Popper, as I read him, for the historicist, history and sociology coincide, or should be made to coincide. Note that his claim is entirely independent (as I see it) from claims that history is or ought to be a theoretical science, since we can leave open the possibility the possibility of history as a theoretical science built upon foundations distinct from those of natural science. The work of Windleband and Rickert, mentioned many times here, focused on the need for history to develop a methodology distinct from the natural sciences, and, until such a method is developed, we cannot honestly critique the limits of its possible rigor as the foundation for a theoretical science.
It was in vogue at this time Popper wrote The Poverty of Historicism to claim that history could be made more scientific by drawing on the resources of psychology and sociology. The middle of the twentieth century was a heyday of psychoanalysis, and it was believed at the time that psychoanalysis was relevant to everything. Psychological history was briefly quite popular (Bruce Mazlish, in particular, is associated with this approach). Less well known was the idea that history should either draw from or be reduced to sociology. The best book on this, so far as I am concerned, is Gorden Leff’s History and Social Theory, however, the vulgar version of this debate is to be found in extenso in the literature on Marxist sociology in relation to history. Perhaps it is this latter tradition that Popper in particular sought to take down.
Because of Popper’s unwillingness to engage with contemporary philosophers of history, choosing as his targets the outsized figures of Hegel, Marx, and Comte, we can’t really make a proper assessment of his critique of the possibility of a theoretical history. A tightly focused study, rather than wrestling with giants, would have made it possible for us to determine the strength of Popper’s argument against theoretical history or history received as sociology, or both. But since Popper’s thought is primarily activist rather than theoretical, it is to be expected that he chooses his targets for greatest effect.
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