Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

5. Popper’s Debt to Marx

CHAPTER FIVE Popper’s Debt to Marx In the previous chapter we considered the economic roots of situational analysis . Our finding that Popper was inspired by the methods of economics was perhaps not terribly surprising, given his close ties with liberal economists, most notably Friedrich Hayek. But we also saw that situational analysis in its latter formulations bore only superficial similarity to the economists’approach. This chapter will consider another source of Popper’s situational analysis, one that was perhaps even more influential than economic theory. That source is Marxism. This will no doubt strike most readers as a surprising claim because Popper is generally regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most influential and forceful critics of Marxism. In his biography of Marx, Isaiah Berlin declared that Popper had produced “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer” (Berlin 1963, 239), while Bryan Magee, in his introductory examination of Popper’s thought, confessed that he could “not see how any rational man can have read Popper’s critique of Marx and still be a Marxist” (Magee 1973, 89). Popper’s principal critique of Marxism is widely understood to be that Marxism is unfalsifiable and thus a pseudoscience. According to Popper’s former student Imre Lakatos, Popper “wanted to show that some allegedly scientific theories, like Marxism and Freudianism, are pseudoscientific and hence that they are no better than astrology” (Lakatos 1978, 168). While there is no doubt that Popper was highly critical of many aspects of Marx’s thought, Popper’s critique of Marx was not as total or one-sided as is often supposed. In particular, he did not think that Marx himself was a purveyor of pseudoscience—at least, he did not think that all of the important aspects of Marx’s thought could described as such. As we shall see, Popper found much to admire in Marx’s work and believed that Marx had made important contributions to the methodology of social science. In fact, Popper ’s situational analysis bears a strong resemblance to the method that Marx employed to explain various aspects of capitalism. Indeed, situational analysis appears to have been inspired in part by his reflection on Marx’s methods. 81 ...