The course of history cannot be predicted: the poverty of historicism

The critique of historicism

Karl Popper 1902 · 1994A theory is scientific if experience can refute it.

What it claims

For strictly logical reasons, we cannot predict the future course of history: history has no law or goal that science can know.

Why

History depends on future knowledge, which cannot be foreseen: so no scientific law can announce its course.

The same idea through history

Karl Popper1934The critique of historicism applies his criterion of science to history: a theory is scientific only if it can be refuted. "Laws of history" meet it poorly, because their defenders interpret every event in their favour (see the argument on falsifiability).

In short

"The course of history cannot be predicted: the poverty of historicism" is an argument by Karl Popper (The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Preface and section 27, 1934) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: no direction). Its claim: For strictly logical reasons, we cannot predict the future course of history: history has no law or goal that science can know. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Preface and section 27

Valid with an implicit premise

Karl Popper calls "historicism" the idea that there are laws or trends of history, which can be discovered and used to predict the future. He aims at Plato, Hegel, Marx, Spengler and others. His thesis, written in 1935-1936 and published in 1944-1945 and then as a book in 1957, is not that history has no order, but that its course cannot be predicted by scientific methods. He gives a "refutation" in five steps, in the 1957 Preface. Note: this text is under copyright; the quotations are short and checked against a scanned copy of the book.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where knowledge is unpredictable, but where economy, demography or geography follow stable laws of development that orient history in spite of it.

Valid with P4. P4 links the unpredictability of knowledge (P1, P2) to the absence of historical law. Without it, one can grant that knowledge is unpredictable without concluding that no historical law exists, for example because other factors, less sensitive to knowledge, might have their regularities. Popper himself specifies that the argument does not refute all social prediction, for instance one that tests economic theories under given conditions; it refutes only the prediction of historical developments to the extent they are influenced by the growth of knowledge. Nor does it prove that history has no meaning: Popper holds that we can give it one.

Analogy. A player who wants to predict tomorrow's chess game. He can foresee trends (fashionable openings), but not the new ideas he or his opponent will have in the meantime. If he could foresee them, he would already have them.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Walter Kaufmann 1951 · attacks the conclusion

Popper ranks Hegel among the fathers of totalitarianism and historicism (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945). Kaufmann argues that this portrait rests on quotations cut from their context and on second-hand sources: Hegel puts freedom at the centre of history. Part of the target of the critique of historicism would therefore not exist as Popper describes it.

no reply

see the argument

Popper did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.

The debate goes on (our summary) Popper's five-step argument holds whichever historicists are aimed at: it does not depend on the reading of Hegel (it dates from 1957, the critique of Hegel from 1945). It remains to decide whether Marx and the other historicists (Comte, for example) did claim to predict. A defender of Marx (G. A. Cohen, 1978) defends it as a theory that explains the past. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Historical debate shared: Kaufmann disputes the reading of Hegel, others (Marx, Comte) are closer to the target. The core disagreement is on whether history can be predicted, not on Hegel. Open point.

E. H. Carr 1961 · attacks the conclusion

The historian does not merely tell of accidents: he looks for causes and generalises. Reducing history to chance, to Cleopatra's nose, is refusing the effort of explanation. Carr explicitly targets Popper and Isaiah Berlin, whom he accuses of rejecting any idea of necessity in history, and holds that historians do identify real general causes.

a defender replies

We have not yet found a direct reply by Popper in the texts.

Isaiah Berlin defender of the argument · 1962

Summary: in his review of What Is History? (New Statesman, 5 January 1962), Berlin sets aside their differences on determinism and moral judgements, treated elsewhere. He objects to Carr that individuals' conscious motives interest historians (had Churchill died before 1939 or Stalin before 1924, these "accidents" would matter) and that applying the methods of natural science leads at best to historical sociology. He also criticises the idea of goals of progress defined only once reached: whatever occurs would be good because it occurs.

The debate goes on (our summary) Popper does not reduce history to chance and does not deny that the past can be explained or that one can generalise: he distinguishes the explanation of past events from the prediction of the future course in so far as it depends on future knowledge. Carr and he differ on what historical generalisations are worth: laws or mere trends (see section 27). (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: are the historian's generalisations laws or trends? Berlin, also targeted by Carr, defends the historical interest of individuals and "accidents" and refuses to call good whatever prevails. It is also the disagreement about what one can expect from history as a science. Open point.

Objection anticipated by Condorcet 1795 · attacks premise 2

If man can predict almost with certainty the phenomena whose laws he knows, and foresee future events with probability from past experience, why should it be chimerical to sketch with some plausibility the future destinies of the human species from its history?

Popper replies

see the argument

Popper Popper's clarification in the Preface

Popper specifies that his argument does not refute every kind of social prediction: it is compatible with testing social theories, for example economic ones, that predict certain developments will occur under certain conditions. It refutes only the prediction of historical developments in so far as they can be influenced by the growth of our knowledge.

The debate goes on (our summary) Condorcet writes before Popper (the objection here is an earlier position denying P2, not a reply to him). He bases prediction on the constancy of the laws of development of human faculties; Popper answers that the development of knowledge itself cannot be foreseen. Condorcet nonetheless anticipates the obstacle: he admits that we can hardly form an idea of the knowledge of the future (X, 46). (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: does the development of knowledge follow laws that can be known, or is it unpredictable by nature? Open question, at the heart of the disagreement between philosophies of progress and the critique of historicism.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Karl PopperHis own argument: the course of history depends on the growth of knowledge, which cannot be predicted, so history cannot be predicted either. In 1988 he adds that there is no necessity of progress: "we can always also regress".