Karl Popper on Historicism and Indeterminism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 28 July 2024 is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Karl Popper (28 July 1902–17 September 1994), who was born in Vienna on this date in 1902.
Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. The idea that the demarcation between science and non-science is defined by the falsifiability of scientific statements is familiar to everyone, and the idea of falsifiability itself has become familiar outside philosophical circles and, like Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift, has made its way into popular culture. Popper also wrote a book on the philosophy of history, The Poverty of Historicism, originally published in 1957, but based on a presentation and a paper of 1936, which I have mentioned in several previous episodes, and which has also been influential.
The Poverty of Historicism is a frontal assault on what Popper called historicism, but one of the reasons I have had occasion to mention this several times previously is due to the fact that so many philosophers have meant so many different things by the term “historicism” that one ought never to invoke “historicism” without specifying what one intends to mean by it. Although Popper’s use of historicism is unusual, and it might have been better if he had adopted some other term for what he wanted to criticize, Popper isn’t alone in his criticism, and the way that others have criticized similar ideas is helpful for understanding Poppers position and the philosophical motivations for his criticisms. Popper also wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945. Superficially, it looks like Popper wrote several books on the philosophy of science, a book on philosophy of history, and a book on political philosophy, but all of these works are bound up together. It was in part Popper’s views on the philosophy of science that prompted him to apply his theory of scientific knowledge to history
The book that initially brought Popper to the attention of the wider philosophical community is what was translated as The Logic and Scientific Discovery, but which would have better been translated as The Logic of Research, originally published in German in 1934. Later in his life Popper published three large volumes under the collective title Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, which postscript is longer than the work to which serves as the postscript. Although Popper’s philosophy of science has come to be influential, his views were not well received at first. In his autobiography, Unended Quest, he wrote:
“…I said first that I did not believe in induction at all, even though I believed in learning from experience… This statement… was well received by the audience who, it appears, took it as a joke, and laughed. In my second attempt I suggested that the whole trouble was due to the mistaken assumption that scientific knowledge was a species of knowledge — knowledge in the ordinary sense in which if I know that it is raining it must be true that it is raining, so that knowledge implies truth. But, I said, what we call “scientific knowledge” was hypothetical, and often not true, let alone certainly or probably true… Again the audience took this for a joke, or a paradox, and they laughed and clapped…” (Unended Quest, 125–126)
This was in 1936, the same year that Popper read the first version of The Poverty of Historicism to a private gathering. Popper wrote in his autobiography that he saw The Poverty of Historicism as being an application of his ideas from The Logic of Scientific Discovery to the social sciences. After his first presentation of The Poverty of Historicism Popper continued to work on the ideas, and the paper grew into a book that he eventually divided up and published as a couple of books. The book we now have as The Open Society and Its Enemies was originally part of a larger draft of The Poverty of Historicism which was eventually cut out of that manuscript and published as a separate work. From the circumstances of their origins we can see that both books are part of the same argument, and in fact both are applications of Popper’s conception of science to the problem of history. And although both works emerge from the application of Popper’s theory of scientific knowledge to history, both are highly polemical works.
I have a lot of sympathy for how Popper arrived at his views on history. In my own thinking about the philosophy of history, I have time and again been driven back to philosophy of science, and have been forced to formulate my own philosophy of science to account for the epistemic status of history. Popper’s intellectual development was in the opposite direction, from philosophy of science to philosophy of history, but the principle of their being bound up in each other is the same. We can’t keep philosophy of science and philosophy of history in separate compartments.
History presents a problem for the philosophy of science, because it seems to be about claims to knowledge, but the nature of historical research differs significantly from the research in the natural sciences. But history isn’t the only problematic case. Mathematics also seems to be about claims of knowledge, but, again, mathematical research is quite different from research in the natural sciences. Mathematics may even be a bigger problem because the natural sciences as we know them today depend on mathematics for their formulations. We judge the rigor of the natural sciences in part by their ability to present their findings as laws of nature expressed quantitatively in mathematical terms.
In any case, anyone who wants to give an adequate philosophical account of human knowledge not only has to give an account of the knowledge arrived at through the natural sciences, but must also give an account of historical knowledge and mathematical knowledge, neither of which neatly fit into epistemological schemes worked out for the natural sciences. Putting them all together is the challenge, and this was part of what was driving Popper’s work. But in the way of outlining what historical knowledge ought to be in light of Popper’s conception of knowledge, Popper came to the view that history and the social sciences had been misconceived. We could call Popper an activist philosopher of history, because he thought both that there was something wrong in history, and that there was something wrong about the way be understood history, and in fact our failure to understand history is what has led humanity into so many disasters — in particular, the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Popper wanted to correct our failure to understand our own history, and his way of correcting our understanding of history was to attack on historicism.
So, what is historicism? Two of the best statements I know of on historicism are the summaries given by Hans Meyerhoff in his Philosophy of History in Our Time, and by Georg Iggers in his The German Conception of History. Here is how Meyerhoff characterized historicism:
“The brief, introductory selection is in the nature of a prelude. It is important for what follows because it is a reminder of some of the general features of historicism such as: (1) the denial of a ‘systematic’ approach to history; (2) the repudiation of any single, unified interpretation of history; and (3) the positive assertions (a) that the basic concepts of history are change and particularity, (b) that the historian has a special way of explaining things by telling a story, and © that history is all-pervasive, that historical categories permeate all aspects of human life, including morality and philosophy.”
Iggers, like Meyerhoff, identifies three properties of historicism, though they aren’t the same three as the properties that Meyerhoff identified:
“Three sets of ideas occupy a central role in the theoretical position of the German national tradition of historiography with which we are concerned in this book: a concept of the state, a philosophy of value, and a theory of knowledge. None of these three concepts is entirely peculiar to German historiography, but all three have found an extreme formulation in German historical thought.”
Iggers goes on to elaborate these three concepts for several pages, calling them “The state as an end in itself and the concept of the Machtstaat,” “Antinormativitat, the rejection of the concept of thinking in normative terms,” and “Anti-Begrifflichkeit, the rejection of conceptualized thinking.” Already you can see we have a problem. Here we have two scholars who are attempting to give an exposition of historicism, and very little of their explanations of historicism overlap. It’s as though both Meyerhoff and Iggers have read Ranke, but each took their own lessons from the master. We should keep this in mind when we hear that Popper had an idiosyncratic conception of historicism, because it seems that he’s not the only one with an idiosyncratic conception of historicism.
Still, there are some properties in common between Meyerhoff and Iggers on historicism. For example, Iggers’ claim that historicism involves a rejection of conceptualized thinking could be interpreted as what Meyerhoff called the denial of a systematic approach to history and the repudiation of any unified interpretation of history. Finding anything in common is worth noting, because views on historicism vary so widely, and some are contradictory.
Popper’s conception of historicism seems to have nothing in common with the conceptions of either Meyerhoff of Iggers, and in some ways Popper contradicts them. For example, Meyerhoff wrote that, for historicism, the basic concepts of history are change and particularity. Popper wrote in The Poverty of Historicism:
“I wish to defend the view, so often attacked as old fashioned by historicists, that history is characterized by its interest in actual, singular, or specific events, rather than in laws or generalizations.”
If we take particularity to be coextensive with actual, singular, or specific events, then Popper’s claim about historicism attacking particularity contradicts Meyerhoff’s claim that particularity is a basic concept of history for historicism. None of this is surprising. We already knew that philosophers disagree on what historicism is, and that Popper’s use in particular is outside the mainstream. But Popper’s conception of scientific knowledge was also outside the mainstream of philosophy of science when he formulated it, and Popper’s critique of historicism is essentially part of his philosophy of science. It is interesting to note that Popper’s philosophy of science has since been widely embraced, but his philosophy of history has been less influential, though it is not without its admirers. The two ought to share the same fate, since they grew out of the same conception of knowledge.
And there’s something else I want to point out. Philosophers tend to go into great detail on matters that others find uninteresting to the point of triviality. Needless to say, the philosophers who do this don’t think that what they are doing is trivial, but rather that they are the only ones taking up difficult problems neglected by others. Given this tendency to belabor distinctions and definitions, when no one has put in the effort to clarify something that is admittedly strange (like Popper’s usage of historicism), that in itself is interesting. This is where we are at with Popper’s conception of historicism. Popper’s usage of historicism is idiosyncratic. Fair enough. Where, then, did he get this idea of historicism? Where did he pick up this conception, why did he call it historicism, and how is it related to more conventional conceptions of historicism?
This is an unwritten chapter in the history of ideas, and I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I’ve been reading through Popper’s autobiography hoping to find the moment when he encounters historicism and realizes that this is the dragon he has to slay, but so far I’ve found nothing. In the absence of an account of the origins of Popper’s conception of historicism, we can only speculate on how he came to the views that he called historicism.
One obvious argument that could be made is that the philosophies of history that he is most interested in criticizing, namely Hegel and Marx, derive from the same intellectual milieu as historicism, which is to say, the milieu that Iggers calls the German conception of history. Even if Hegel was not a historicist in the strict sense, both Hegel’s work and explicitly historicist work came out of the same Germanophone historical tradition. Beyond this connection, finding the origins of Popper’s historicism is difficult.
I think part of what is going on is that Popper believed that historicism, in treating each epoch of history on its own terms, is presenting these self-sufficient epochs of history as discrete stages of history, and Popper further believed that historical stages are intrinsically deterministic. I’m working on a stand-alone episode on the idea of stages of history as these are employed in philosophy of history, so I won’t go into this in any more detail at present.
A more likely source of Popper’s disdain for historicism is that it is a relativistic conception, according to which every age much be judged by its own standards and not by transcendental standards that are held to be outside all history. Since Popper was formulating a conception of knowledge that he was applying in a universalistic way, the relativism of historicism would present itself as an obvious target. These are just my speculations, and you can take them with a grain of salt, since it isn’t relevant to understanding or criticizing Popper’s criticism of historicism.
What is relevant is understanding what Popper meant by historicism, but even this isn’t easy to pin down, since Popper himself gives a number of different formulations of historicism. However, what Popper comes back to time and again are criticisms of the very possibility of a theoretical history, and criticisms of determinism. For Popper, the two are connected, since he imagines that a theoretical history would be a discipline that aims at making predictions, and we could only make predictions if history is deterministic. Here is one of Popper’s definitions of 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.”
In other words, a theoretical history would be like theoretical physics, which states mathematical laws of nature that can be used to make predictions. I want to point out that in this quote Popper doesn’t mention philosophy of history or even theoretical history, but rather social science. Popper frequently shifts between criticizing theoretical history and criticizing the social sciences, seeming to assume that they are the same thing, but never giving us the definitive demonstration that the two are one. Popper again:
“…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; in other words, there can be no theoretical history
- 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 a predictive science of history possible, 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.”
Here Popper makes the claim that sociology, which we can take as proxy for the social sciences, is the same as theoretical history, but he attributes this to historicists, rather than showing us himself that the two coincide. Again:
“…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.”
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 of history as a theoretical science built upon foundations distinct from those of natural science.
All of this about predictions made by a theoretical history, which for Popper coincides with the social sciences, is rejected by Popper because of his rejection of determinism. Earlier I quoted Popper from The Poverty of Historicism that:
“I wish to defend the view, so often attacked as old fashioned by historicists, that history is characterized by its interest in actual, singular, or specific events, rather than in laws or generalizations.”
Years before this in The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper had written:
“…non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.” (p. 86)
Taken together, if history is about actual, singular, or specific events, and such events are of no significance to science, then it must follow that there can be no theoretical science of history that can make historical predictions. This denial of a predictive science of history culminates in Popper’s argument against determinism. The Preface to Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism gives an admirably brief exposition of his argument against historical determinism and inevitability:
1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. (The truth of this premise must be admitted even by those who see in our ideas, including our scientific ideas, merely the by-products of material development of some kind or other.)
2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge. (This assertion can be logically proved, by considerations which are sketched below.)
3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.
4. This means that 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.
5. The fundamental aim of historicist methods (see sections 11 to 16 of this book) is therefore misconceived; and historicism collapses.
Popper gives a longer version of this argument in Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, in the volume titled The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, Chapter III, The Case for Indeterminism. What I find interesting about this is that Popper bases his argument for indeterminism on the role of science in human history. I know why he does this, of course. His point is that a science cannot predict it own future states. A science of history, a theoretical history as Popper calls it, could not predict the future discoveries that it would make in historical knowledge. But we could still formulate Popper’s argument for indeterminism without reference to scientific knowledge.
We could make the argument, and with equal plausibility I think, that the methods of choral composition do not allow us to predict the future works of choral composition. Therefore, we cannot predict the future course of human history because we cannot predict the future works of choral music that will be composed on the basis of known method of composition. I don’t think that Popper would have found this to be as interesting or as convincing as they way he formulated the argument. Why? Is the operative intuition here that science is more consequential to history than choral performance? Does history possess the liberty of indifference in respect to works of art, but not in respect to discoveries of science? Is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy less constitutive of Western history than quantum chromodynamics?
Despite Popper’s disdain for Hegel, he hasn’t managed to entirely escape Hegel. I don’t mean that Hegel exercised some kind of subterranean influence on Popper that ultimately was expressed in Popper’s work in spite of his efforts to eradicate any influence. What I mean is that Hegel and Popper were formulating a similar intuition, albeit in very different terms. When we talk about the role of science and prediction in history, even to deny them, we are talking about the role of reason in history. This is Hegelian territory.
Popper believed that scientific discoveries were sufficiently historically important that our inability to use science to predict future scientific discoveries means that we cannot predict history. Another way of saying this would be to say that the cunning of reason in history is such that we cannot predict its twists and turns, but we can definitively say that the unfolding of reason in human history is constitutive of that history. Without novel scientific discoveries, that is to say, without the unfolding of reason in history, history would be other than what in fact it is. This sounds dangerously like Hegel, but we can conceal from ourselves that we are talking about the unfolding of reason in history when we formulate this as the unpredictability of scientific discovery. Popper represents the “safe” way to talk about the role of reason in history, whereas Hegel represents the dangerous way to talk about the role of reason in history, but both are, in a sense, talking about the same thing.
