1.5 Popper And Historicism
Last modified 07/05/2008
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It is significant that one of first reactions to scientism springs from
the philosopher Popper, but only in the context of a critique of Marxist theory.
Popper's usage of the term 'historicism' invokes a word with a complex history,
and emerges as a variant of the classic critique of Kant of the idea of
causality in relation to the idea of freedom.
Popper's criticism was not unjust and pointed to the obvious confusion in leftists over the implications of the 'historical inevitability' of revolution and a coming socialist state. We can't make predictions about the future, if free agents are free to contradict the prediction. This issue haunted the generation of the early Marxists whose sense of the coming of post-capitalism as inevitable left them with the paradox of free action. Should they assume the prediction to the degree of passivity, or act work to bring it about. The answer is that the 'law of history' indicated simply wasn't a law. A variant of this reasoning lurks in the idea field of Darwinism, where the sense of natural selection as a universal law thus automatically suggests a puzzle about the future: should an agent passively observe its future action, or actively enter the realization of its implied emphasis on survival, competition, and extermination. The subtitle of Darwin's book hung in the air as an unconscious answer to that dangerous set of 'implications'.
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