Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

POPPER’S DEBT TO MARX

himself, although he indicates that Marx’s followers were even more guilty of historicism. But we saw that this charge was directed at Marx’s more sweeping pronouncements about history and the fate of capitalism. When Popper conducts a close analysis of Marx’s predictions of socialist revolution and the emergence of a classless society, the inadequacies that Popper detects in Marx’s explanations do not stem from a deep methodological error, such as invoking nonexistent laws that govern historical development. Rather, they arise from Marx’s poverty of imagination, romantically induced wishful thinking, and sketchy reasoning. POP P ER’S DEBT TO MARX Our brief tour through Popper’s critique of Marx shows that Popper’s criticisms were not as deep as is often thought and prepares the ground for my claim that Popper is in fact indebted to Marx methodologically. It should not be altogether surprising to assert Popper’s debt to Marx; as noted above, Popper explicitly acknowledged that Marx had influenced his understanding of social inquiry (CR, 125 n. 3; OSE II, 82). However, Popper was rather vague about the precise nature of Marx’s impact on him. What I argue below is that Popper’s encounter with Marx appears to have significantly influenced Popper ’s own contributions to social science methodology. In fact, Popper’s recommended approach to social inquiry, including his concept of situational analysis, is remarkably similar to some of Marx’s actual explanatory practices or, at least, to Popper’s interpretation of Marx’s methods. What, then, did Marx teach Popper about social science? First, Marx helped to convince Popper that the primary task of social science is to lay bare the unintended repercussions of social action. In numerous places Popper asserts that this is the chief goal of social science. He first introduces this notion of social science in chapter 14 of The Open Society while discussing what he characterizes as Marx’s attack on psychologism (OSE II, 95). In a footnote to that chapter, Popper notes that Karl Polanyi, in private conversation , had first suggested to him “that it was Marx who first conceived social theory as the study of unwanted social repercussions of nearly all our action” (OSE II, 323 n. 11; Popper’s italics). Several years later, in a 1948 essay entitled “Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition,”Popper declared his “indebtedness to Marx,”who “was one of the first critics of the conspiracy theory, and one of the first to analyze the unintended consequences of the voluntary actions of people acting in certain social situations” (CR, 125 n. 3; Popper’s italics). Thus, although Popper never explicitly states that he borrowed this understanding of social science from Marx, it seems plausible that this was the case. Second, Popper seems to have developed his version of methodological individualism through his encounter with Marx. In chapter 1, we considered Popper’s defense of this doctrine in the context of his attack on psychologism and methodological collectivism. The bulk of that discussion was drawn from 90 KARL POPPER AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES chapters 13 and 14 of The Open Society, where Popper discusses methodological individualism in the context of Marx’s explanatory practices.To have challenged psychologism and defended the autonomy of sociology was, Popper says, “perhaps the greatest achievement of Marx as a sociologist” (OSE II, 88). Although Popper stops short of labeling Marx an advocate of methodological individualism—in fact, he (somewhat inconsistently) accuses him of methodological collectivism—we will see below that Popper’s own interpretation of Marx’s explanations reveals Marx’s methodological individualism. In addition, though Popper initially developed his concept of situational analysis independently of Marx, it is clear that Popper considered many of Marx’s explanations to be exemplary applications of situational analysis. Like situational analyses, what Popper calls Marx’s “institutional analyses” are accounts of individuals acting rationally in accordance with their social situation . Also, the examples of Marx’s institutional analyses that Popper praises could be characterized as situational models designed to explain a range of structurally similar situations rather than mere idiographic explanations. They are meant to shed light on capitalism in general, not merely the capitalism of ninteenth-century England. To back up these claims, we need to find textual evidence in which Popper praises Marx for employing institutional analyses, adhering to the principle of methodological individualism, and uncovering unintended consequences. Popper ’s interpretations of Marx’s analyses of the trade cycle and class conflict under capitalism are two...