CONCEPT
Historicism
The doctrine Popper spent his career demolishing — that history follows discoverable laws from which the future can be predicted and society redesigned — and the conceptual trap the AI river metaphor risks reviving.
Historicism, as Popper defined it in The Poverty of Historicism, is the belief that history follows laws analogous to those of physics. Marx claimed to have identified them in class struggle. Hegel in the dialectic of Spirit. Spengler in civilizational cycles. In each case, the claim was that history is going somewhere, that the current carries us in a direction discernible by those with the right theoretical apparatus. Popper's refutation was compact: the course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge; the future growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable (if we could predict what we will know tomorrow, we would already know it today); therefore, the future course of history cannot be predicted; therefore, historicism is false. The elegance of the argument did not dim its urgency. Historicism, for Popper, was not merely wrong. It was dangerous — the intellectual foundation of every totalitarian demand for acceleration toward the inevitable.
