Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason (review)

Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. By John Kadvany. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. xx; 378 pp. $23.95 (paperback); $69.95 (hardback).

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, there was great interest in using Imre Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs (MSRPs) as a framework within which to make sense of the history of economics. In the whole of the resulting literature, it was assumed that Lakatos's philosophical position was essentially Popperian, his MSRP being very close to the later, more “sophisticated,” position held by Karl Popper. In this book, John Kadvany challenges this assumption. Lakatos, he argues, had a Hegelian view of rationality that he never abandoned. The MSRP should be seen, not simply as a variant on Popperian philosophy, but as a covert Hegelian attempt to subvert Popperianism. Kadvany argues that Hegelian methods also provided the foundations for Lakatos's work on the philosophy of mathematics (in his doctoral thesis, which became Proofs and Refutations [1976]) and his work as a Communist Party activist in Hungary before he left for Britain. To quote Kadvany's preface, his thesis is that “Lakatos's English-language philosophy of science and mathematics is a philosophical palimpsest, containing an original and instructive account of historical rationality deriving from Hegel, Marx and the Hegelian-Marxism of . . . Georg Lukács” (xvii). In short, Lakatos never abandoned the philosophical position of his Stalinist youth: he applied it covertly to new problems.

The essence of Lakatos's method goes back, through Hegel, to Pyrrhonian skepticism. This is not a doctrine about whether or not it is possible to get beneath appearances to some form of certain knowledge, but rather a set of methods designed to show that all claims to certainty can be undermined. At the risk of oversimplifying a long and complex argument, the skeptical method involves turning people's claims against themselves. This is what the MSRP did for Popper's philosophy of science. It is also the method through which, according to Lakatos's account, mathematics developed in the nineteenth century. Proofs (claims to certain knowledge) were turned against themselves through the generation of counterexamples. Analyses of counterexamples led to new proofs, which were in turn overthrown. Kadvany even claims that this method makes sense of the way Lakatos applied his method of rational reconstructions (with their attendant falsifying footnotes) to question conventional approaches to the history of science. Throughout, Lakatos was searching for rationality in a world where one knows that all one's beliefs are false. In such a world, rationality has to be found in history—in a process that causes current beliefs to be better than those previously held.

To evaluate Kadvany's argument properly would require knowledge not only of Lakatos's work but also of Goethe and the Bildungsroman genre; Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the relationship of Hegel to Kant; Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, Popperian philosophy of science, and the history of nineteenth-century mathematics; Kurt Gödel's theorem and the way mathematicians responded to it; and the political history of Hungary from the Communist takeover until the 1956 uprising. I will, therefore, refrain from attempting to do so. However, it is clear that the way in which Kadvany has integrated these diverse narratives into a single argument is a remarkable achievement. I found parts of the book hard going, but the book was extremely stimulating and I strongly recommend it. I doubt that this book will, or should, lead to a revival of interest in Lakatos's MSRP as a framework for studying the history of economics. It should, however, provoke a reevaluation of Lakatos's work (especially on the history of mathematics), providing an answer to anyone who regards it as philosophically naive. It may also provide a route whereby those for whom German philosophy has been a largely closed book can begin to understand something of Hegel.