Historicism ( II )

    Some preliminary cautions and notices to begin: I do not claim to be an expert on either the work of Karl Popper [1902-1994] as a whole or on historicism as a concept.  My commentary here is an informal one based on a reading of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, The Poverty of Historicism and Conjectures and Refutations.  Thus, others in this forum with a greater knowledge of Popper's work can certainly augment and improve anything I'm able to offer here -and I hope that they would.   I'm also unable to discuss historicism in light of a reading of other philosophers who have critiqued it since Popper.  

I have relied on these editions in drafting the following :

  The Poverty of Historicism
(c) 1957, 1960, 1961, Karl Popper,
(c) 2002 Estate of Karl Popper;
 Published 2002, Routledge Classics/ Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon,OX, U.K. & New York
(isbn: 0 415 27846 5)

 and

The Open Society and Its Enemies ,

Vol. 1: "The Spell of Plato",
Vol. 2: "The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath"
(c) 1966, 5th Ed. Revised, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

 and for the biographical information,

  Karl Popper: un philosophe heureux; essai de biographie intellectuelle by Michelle-Irène Brundy
(c) Paris, 2002, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

This is still in the form of a rough draft.  But I'm now so annoyed with  myself for not having gotten farther along that I'm posting it as it is and letting the discussion pick out the faults and smooth out the rough spots.
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    Popper's  youth and education -- briefly.  

    Karl Popper, the third child and only son of Jenny Schiff and Simon Popper, was born at Ober St. Veit, a suburb of Vienna.  Karl had two older sisters,  Emilie Dorthea  (Dora), eight years  his senior, and Anna Lydia (Annie), four years older.  Karl's father, Simon, was a lawyer who ran a successful and influential law practice.   He was also a Doctor of philosophy and an accomplished student of history.  He translated Greek classics and read widely in history and the humanities.  His extensive library contained, among much else, all of Freud's works as these appeared in their first editions.   Dr. Popper was also a leading figure in several charitable associations providing relief to the poor in Vienna.

 Simon's death in Vienna in 1932 was followed six years later by that of Jenny.  Dora worked as a nurse during the war (1914-18) and later as a civil servant.  Stricken with a grave and incurable illness, she took her own life in 1932.  Annie became a dancer and a professor of dance, eventually settling in Ascona, in Switzerland.

    As Popper explains in prefatory notes, The Poverty of Historicism (PoH) came from work which extended from the end of 1919 until February, 1936, when it was first presented as a scholarly paper.  The impulse for The Open Society and Its Enemies (OS&E) came two years later in March of 1938, when Hitler's forces invaded Austria.  Its first English edition was published in 1945 by Routledge & Kegan Paul publishers in London.

    Behind that cursory description lie the varied events which marked Popper's youth and intellectual development.  These included, as a back-drop, the continuing tangled and messy confrontation between burgeoning socialist movements and an established capitalist political and economic order.   That over-simplified dichotomy belies the contending social, political and economic beliefs which, as in all times, can be found to cut across the gamut of society and divide opinion within groups of peers and thus frustrates any complete or easy division between the usual picture  of economic classes.  The backdrop also included the war of 1914 and the upheaval and hardships which followed defeat.  For Popper, it meant a secondary-school education which was punctuated by changes from one school  to another, by his extended  absences due to illness and by his boredom with the rote character of the teaching.

    Eventually, Popper abandoned his formal secondary school studies and joined a recently-formed association of socialist high-school students, a circle created by Paul Lazarsfeld and Ludwig Wagner.  He divided his time between his own studies, his political activism and working at manual labor.  His Marxist political activism would twice place him at the scene of confrontations between police and demonstrators, during the second of which there were people in the crowd killed and injured by the police.  The event marked Popper profoundly.  

    He gained his high-school diploma by exam and took up an eclectic group of courses as an independent auditor in 1919 at the University of Vienna and, three years later, joined as a formally- enrolled student.  He soon narrowed his studies to mathematics and physics.  In 1925, in the middle of his university courses, he concluded that, due to his Jewish origins, he could not expect to obtain a post teaching in a university.   He then supplemented his university classes with courses at a new teacher's college established by the city of Vienna and he followed a curriculum intended to provide him with the credentials to teach science and mathematics in secondary school.  It is there at the teaching college that he met Anna Josefine Henniger (Hennie), daughter of a middle class Catholic family, and married her after a six year courtship.   Popper's parents had converted from Judaism to Catholicism two years before Karl was born.  By 1936, Popper saw that remaining in Austria placed him and his wife in peril of the mounting anti-semitism--from which his parents' conversion would not spare them.  In November of the same year he resigned from a teaching post and, after seeking a refuge in Britain and New Zealand, he and Hennie left for New Zealand in early 1937, going by way of London.  He spent the war years teaching at the University of New Zealand and he finished work on OS&E there.  After the war, Popper and his wife went to London where he had obtained a teaching position at the London School of Economics.

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« ...[T]here are some sound elements in historicism; it is a reaction against the naïve method of interpreting political history merely as the story of great tyrants and great generals.  Historicists rightly feel that there may be something better than this method.  It is this feeling which makes their idea of 'spirits'--of an age, of a nation, of an army--so seductive.  
    Now I have not the slightest sympathy with these 'spirits' ... yet I feel that they indicate, at least, the existence of a lacuna, of a place which it is the task of sociology to fill with something more sensible, such as an analysis of problems arising within a tradition.  There is room for a more detailed analysis of the logic of situations.  The best historians have often made use, more or less unconsciously, of this conception....  Beyond this logic of the situation, or perhaps as a part of it, we need something like an analysis of social movements.  We need studies, based on methodological individualism, of the social institutions through which ideas may spread and captivate individuals, of the way in which new traditions may be created, and of the way in which traditions work and break down.  In other words, our individualistic and institutionalistic models of such collective entities as nations, or governments, or markets, will have to be supplemented by models of political situations as well as of social movements such as scientific and industrial progress. (A sketch of such an analysis of progress will be found in [Popper's] next section.)  These models may then be used by historians, partly like other models, and partly for the purposes of explanation, along with the other universal laws they use.  But even this would not be enough; it would still not satisfy all those real needs which historicism attempts to satisfy. »
-- Popper, The Poverty of Historicism , Ch. 4,  (Section 31: Situational Logic in History) pp. 137-138.

    My ambition and my project here in this series intended to discuss Popper and his views of historicism is to help encourage some wider consideration of those studies--and what they'd consist of--which, though they have perhaps been pursued within the confines of academic research, seem still not to have made any discernable progress in piercing and settling into the work-a-day consciousness or unconsciousness of those of us outside of professional scholarship.  

    Historicism is a tendency, more or less pronounced, to see history as an unfolding process which is directed and informed by some fundamental principles or laws and which, when correctly discerned by the careful observer, not only reveal a kind of ordering sense to all that has happened in humanity's past, but which  also, just as much and more importantly, must reveal the direction and, with it, the meaning « behind » what unfolds in the present and in what is to come, in what, indeed, must come next.   The ways in which such a tendency of thought can express itself are quite varied.  It entails more than a search for patterns in the past or present, more than an attempt to draw « lessons » from a selection of historical facts.  It assumes, rather, that there is a general meaning and direction of all human existence--or even, for some, of all existence, human and otherwise--which, once grasped, should help inform us  as to what our destinies are to be as societies, as a civilization.  

    In subtlety and in seductiveness, historicist thinking is so powerful an orienting manner of seeing things that it is something which almost everyone engages in from time to time.   Thus, as a sort of common persistent error, it is a malady for which there is treatment but so far no reliable cure.  The best defense is in recognizing as many as possible of the common traits of historicist thinking.  Those characteristic traits can be found in points of view from all parties, they can corrupt the perceptions of those in any social and economic group, tripping up the most erudite, as well as the least instructed.  

    When sweeping programs of radical social changes are demanded, when long-standing human characteristics which are blamed as being at the root of various evils are targeted for complete eradication, you are in the presence of historicist thinking.  Historicist thought often takes the position that, in analysing social phenomena and looking for their meaning, it is essential that   we consider these holistically rather than as collections of discrete constituent elements--though they may be composed of such.  Holistic change which has as its object the establishment of utopian ideals is another hallmark of historicist thought.  

    Popper begins his account by describing historicism's roots in the thought of Heraclitus and Plato.  With Heraclitus and Plato, a change in or departure from the earliest traditions meant decline and decay.   Only by fierce and constant adherence to established traditions in all aspects of life, could people avoid the dangers which any and all change posed.  All things were pure and perfect in their original forms and they remain so in another ideal existence, where, according to Plato, each material object has its ideal and incorruptible original example.   Human existence, being inherently removed from the ideal, is subject to and suffers from the tendency of things to deviate from their ideal forms.  

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  That, I hope, can launch some discussion and I'll post some further parts of Popper's argument and  examples with some comment of my own in subsequent posts.