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The Poverty of Historicism
Popper's 1957 systematic argument against <em>the doctrine that history follows discoverable laws</em> — and the companion volume to The Open Society that articulates piecemeal engineering as the alternative to utopian comprehensive reform.
The Poverty of Historicism, published in 1957, collects essays Popper had written in the 1930s and 1940s attacking what he called historicism — the doctrine that history follows laws analogous to those of physics, from which the future can be predicted and society redesigned. Popper's targets included Marx, Hegel, Comte, and Mill's social methodology. His central argument is compact and has never been successfully refuted: 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 positive complement is piecemeal engineering: the method of small, specific, testable interventions as the alternative to comprehensive utopian plans.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's target was not academic. Historicist frameworks, for Popper, were the intellectual foundation of the totalitarian ideologies that had
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