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The Grounds for Anti-Historicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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In his seminal The Poverty of Historicism (hereafter PH) Sir Karl Popper deployed a number of arguments to prick the pretensions of those who thought that they were, or could come to be, in possession of knowledge of the (social) future. These ‘historicists’ assumed that they could lay bare the law of evolution of a society, and that their possession of knowledge of such a law justified (large-scale) political action which had the aim of removing obstacles to the progress of history. In arguing against historicism Popper was clearly motivated by his interest in removing the intellectual backing for such revolutionary political practice. My first reading of PH was in the company of people who were extremely dismissive of the anti-revolutionary message, and who tended to argue that if that was the conclusion of Popper's theoretical argument, then obviously the argument was flawed. Within their context, that of the implementation of apartheid policy in South Africa, there was much to be said for this attitude. There is no doubt that Popper's message was insufficiently contextualised, or rather that he did not signpost very clearly whether he intended the anti-revolutionary political prescription to have limited or universal application. In this paper I want to reconsider some of these issues, particularly whether the truth of anti-historicism, in the sense intended by Popper, has such conservative consequences for political action.
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References
1 The seminal character of Popper's argument is testified to by Isiah Berlin: “[Popper] exposed ‘historicism’ with such force and precision, and made so clear its incompatibility with any kind of scientific empiricism, that there is no further excuse for confounding the two” (Berlin, I., Historical Inevitability, Oxford University Press, 1954, pp. 10–11).Google Scholar
2 ‘Popper's most passionage disagreements with historicism are over its implications for practice’ (Donagan, A. Popper's Examination of Historicism, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), Open Court, Illinois, 1974, p. 914)Google Scholar. Popper also decried historicist quietism, a doctrine which claimed the futility of any intervention in the social arena.
3 Only one form, because naturalism is not just one doctrine. For further discussion, see Macdonald, Graham, ‘The Nature of Naturalism’, The Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LXVI (1992), pp. 225–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Baldwin, Tom, ‘Two Types of Naturalism’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 80(1993), pp. 171–99.Google Scholar
4 See Winch, Peter, ‘Popper and Scientific Method in the Social Sciences’, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), pp. 889–904Google Scholar, and O'Hear, Anthony, Karl Popper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp .153–70.Google Scholar
5 The interaction between the two domains obviously makes for a more complicated picture. Some natural scientific experiments have consequences for human misery, such as those involving testing the atomic bomb. Presumably Popper would have been as much against these as he was against large-scale social experimentation.
6 Negative utilitarianism maintains that avoiding pain is better than pursuing happiness. It is needed in this context because by itself uncertainty about our social future could not produce a preference for smallscale change. If the pursuit of happiness outranked the avoidance of pain we might settle on a risk-taking strategy.
7 This ontological interpretation of historical materialism would align it with materialisms such as mind-brain identity theories. Such views seem far removed from Marx's thoughts.
8 See Cohen, G. A., Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar What follows is the briefest possible summary of a complex account.
9 Popper himself used other arguments to reject Marxist theory. One which is relevant here arises from his methodological prescription that falsified theories ought to be rejected. Given that the revolutionary predictions of Marxism turned out to be false, Marxist theory of history ought not to be considered a ‘live’ theory. Appraising this objection would take us far afield into the Lakatosian territory of positive and negative research programmes. General problems of prediction are discussed in the text below.
10 See Goldstone, Jack, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of Calfiornia Press, 1991).Google Scholar
11 Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, p. 145.
12 A ‘normalcy condition’ seems to be a normal feature of explanation in the special sciences. The way Cohen puts it for the Marxist case is: if there were to be a meteor whose impact on earth destroyed all human society, it would not invalidate a theory which claimed that in normal (meteor-free) conditions, societies tend to develop their productive forces. The case for such normalcy conditions in biology is persuasively argued by Garrett Millikan, Ruth in ‘Thoughts Without Laws’, Philosophical Review 95, no. 1 (1986), pp. 47–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An interesting feature of Millikan's case is that she denies that biology is predictive.
13 Those Marxist predictions which stem from the labour theory of value (e.g. that there will be a tendency for the rate of profit to decline) are discarded by Cohen because he rejects the labour theory of value.
14 See Cohen's, Joshua review of Karl Marx's Theory of History, in The Journal of Philosophy vol. 79, no. 5 (1982)Google Scholar, for some counter-evidence.
15 Functional hypotheses are particularly difficult to test, involving as they do questions about the selectionist history of the putatively functional traits. Elder, John grapples with the problems in Natural Selection in the Wild (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
16 This ignores complications which arise on singularist accounts of causality, but as Popper was not such a singularist this is, in this context, justifiable.
17 This whole account is a very crude presentation of much more complicated matters, but for present purposes a ‘coarse grid’ account will do. I am also not attending to any specific predictions emanating from the labour theory of value. For a more subtle account of the connections between social prediction, historical inevitability, determinism, and revolutionary agency, see Cohen's ‘Historical Inevitability and Revolutionary Agency’, in G. A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 51–82.
18 A defence of social science prediction which emphasizes type of future knowledge is provided by Gilbert, Margaret and Berger, Fred, ‘On An Argument for the Impossibility of Prediction in the Social Sciences’, in Studies in Epistemology , Rescher, N. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).Google Scholar
19 Goldstone Revolutions and Rebellion, p. 479.
20 Ibid. p. 155.