The Poverty of Historicism
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 AI Story
The book's target was not academic. Historicist frameworks, for Popper, were the intellectual foundation of the totalitarian ideologies that had devastated Europe. If history has a direction and the direction is knowable, then opposition to acceleration toward the historically determined future is mere reactionary resistance. The totalitarian leader who claims to have read history's laws demands submission to those laws — which means, in practice, submission to his interpretation of them. Popper's refutation of historicism was therefore a political as well as a philosophical project.
The philosophical core of the argument — the unpredictability of knowledge growth — has proven remarkably durable. Even critics who dispute Popper's readings of specific historicists concede the structural point: since knowledge shapes history, and new knowledge cannot be predicted, history's specific course cannot be predicted. The most that can be identified are trends — patterns that have held — not laws that must continue to hold.
The AI application is direct. Metaphors of technological inevitability — "the river of intelligence," "the technium," "the singularity is near" — function as historicist framings in Popper's precise sense. They claim to have identified a direction in which technology is flowing and suggest that human agency consists in adapting to the direction rather than questioning it. Popper's argument applies: the trend of widening intelligence channels does not entail the continuation of the trend. The future is shaped by choices that have not been made, inventions that have not been conceived, and consequences that have not been observed. Treating the trend as a law forecloses the agency the open society depends on.
Origin
Published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1957. Based on essays Popper had written in the 1930s, some of which had appeared in Economica in 1944–1945. Popper considered the book a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies, addressing the methodological foundations that The Open Society addressed politically.
Key Ideas
Unpredictability of knowledge. Since knowledge shapes history and new knowledge cannot be predicted, history cannot be predicted.
Trends vs. laws. Historical patterns are trends, not laws — they may continue but are not required to.
Utopian vs. piecemeal. Comprehensive reform projects fail because the knowledge required to predict their consequences does not exist; piecemeal engineering succeeds because it learns.
Political implications. Historicist framing absolves those driving change of responsibility by converting their choices into natural forces.
AI relevance. Contemporary metaphors of technological inevitability reproduce the historicist structure Popper identified.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge, 1957.
- Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge, 1945.
- Berlin, Isaiah. Historical Inevitability. Oxford University Press, 1954.