One of the classic critiques of Marxism arose in Karl Popper's critique of historicism. As we look the emergence of liberalism we note the way it was armed with 'general universal histories', but not theories. The liberal/postliberal Marxism was a new continuation armed with a 'theory', which immediately succumbed to the classic difficulties outlined by Popper and Berlin. 

A Science Of History?

Let us restate the issue of a science of history, and explore the way in which we can proceed using the data of the eonic effect as a resolution of this question. Note something odd. We speak of a science of evolution, but seldom of a science of history, save as some potential project for the future. The reason is uncomfortably obvious. The facts of history won't allow us to indulge in guessing games. We have all the data before us (or just behind us) and we get a reality check if we try to produce mechanical schemata with a scientific flavor. In fact, we have discovered the long lost key to such a science, but it is not a standard type of science, it must be what philosophers of history wished to call a 'science of freedom'. 

What's more, if we see the overlap of history and evolution, the question of a science of evolution is going to have to accept a question mark too. A science of evolution? The question of a science of history has remained the elusive goal of those hoping to complete the project of reductionism and bring the totality of the phenomena of nature under one comprehensive explanation. The legacy of physics, as in its elegant Newtonian formulation, forgetting for a moment such later subjects as Quantum Mechanics, suggests that we search for laws of history. The classic problem that arises with this project has always been the contradiction involved in the denial of freedom, and historians, without putting it in these terms, generally operate under the assumption that freedom to create history is a given. We are confronted with a stark contradiction. Either we apply the standard of reductionism to find causal laws and lose on the question of freedom, or we acknowledge the failure of reductionism, renounce the search for laws, and allow a place for the idea of freedom. This involves saying that science is incomplete, and that it can’t explain the whole of reality, history being a peculiar exception. But that’s a very big exception.  We should not renounce a science of history so easily. The eonic effect shows the beautifully simple solution to the dilemma. 

There are two well-known treatments of this question, one from Isaiah Berlin in his essay on ‘historical inevitability’, and another from the philosopher of science Karl Popper, who expresses the issue in terms of the idea 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.[Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1991)]

It is interesting that while there is no term for a science of history, there is a term for the lack of one, the famous term, 'historicism', a term with a complex semantic history, one meaning of which, a la Popper, expresses a critique of any such science. Popper is affirming the freedom pole of the apparent contradiction between freedom and necessity. We are in a strange position, we wouldn't want to associate ourselves with something so disreputable as historicism. But we are about to embrace Popper's objection, and then sail right by it. We will accept the dire warning as to what Popper calls ‘historicism’, but we are not in search of historical laws that would preempt the freedom factor. We don't have to search for anything, we already have the answer, as a pattern of data, if we can understand it. Note the difference. Everyone is looking to extend scientific principles to new phenomena. We are taking some empirical data and attempt to make sense of it, hopefully in a scientific manner. A problem with Popper's statement lies in the way it lumps together 'laws', trends, and rhythms. These are not the same. The eonic effect, we can see, is not a claim for laws of history, but it does seem to show a set of trends, and a definite rhythm. The point is that the latter two don't have to be deterministic. Population trends are semi-deterministic in this sense. They follow exponential laws, but if you announce on the radio that an exponential trend might end badly, then the exponential trend might change. The factor of free action again! Humans could interact with demographic law. 

Actually if you examine the issues carefully you will realize that the term 'evolution' will be in danger of historicism also. The problem is that Darwinists have coined its usage incorrectly, in the process making it a deterministic process of microevolution based on genetics. For history, that won't work. The way we have set up our question rules this out, because the distinction we have made between ‘history’ and ‘evolution’ simply does not suggest that the deterministic approach. One reason, looking at the eonic effect, lies in the stream and sequence interplay. The streams bog down, while the sequence leapfrogs times and zones of space to 'free itself up' to advance. We are fortunate, because the eonic effect warns us that there is such a 'macro' process that is over and above the genetic. A high-level ‘macro’ process works as ‘eonic evolution’, and out of this emerges the ‘self-evolution’, i.e. the ‘history’ of individuals. This is what we have called history. To be sure, there could be some higher determinism behind the facts of the case, which show a contrast of a system and free action. But that would be a strange case. Our distinction holds one way or the other. 

On the other hand, as noted, we do seem to be indulging in historicism in the sense of finding patterns, trends, and rhythms. In fact, there is no real contradiction. We have discovered the ‘eonic effect’, a non-random pattern, but this pattern is not evidence of an historical law. In the first place it is intermittent, on and then off, on again, off again. It couldn’t be deterministic. Second, it shows parallel effects in synchronous diversity, not causality at all.  However, in some sense, there is something that does ‘cause’ the eonic effect.  There must be some ‘explanation’ for it, but it may not be standard causality. We should drop the physics language, ‘cause’, and retreat to ‘generalized explanation’ of some kind.  The result is not a set of laws, but an 'evolution freedom'.  

Another problem Popper has is that of prediction, the consequence of having laws. In fact, in the data we have, the fallacy of prediction is not open to us. We are attempting, looking backward, to understand history. We assume can change the future now and in the present, so, since laws weren't our concern, the red herring of prediction doesn't apply. Note that our intermittent process has come to a stop in our recent past, and left our self-evolution in its wake. So we can only say that in the past some process generated a non-random pattern.  And then it stopped acting. We are left in its wake to self-evolve, i.e. do history. This beautiful properties of an intermittent, eonic, system allow us to bypass the contradictions that beset a science of history.