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Popper and Historicist Necessities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Antony Flew
Antony Flew
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Extract

The performance which follows, like Caesar's Gaul, falls into three parts. Part I consists in a sympathetic and reconstructive criticism of Sir Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). Part II offers a somewhat less sympathetic critique of the critique of Popper offered in E. H. Carr's Trevelyan Lectures What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961; and since Pelicanned). Finally, in a shorter Part III, there will be some conclusions concerning what sociologists and historians can and cannot hope to discover about necessities and impossibilities in human affairs.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 251 , January 1990, pp. 53 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 The Open Society by Popper, K. R. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945)Google Scholar. Carr refers to Vol. II, p. 197, of the second revised edition of 1952. The statement quoted in the text above is not to be found on that page in the fifth revised edition of 1966.

2 See the third leg of that tripos, Popper, K. R.'s The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (London: Hutchinson, 1982).Google Scholar

3 Compare Flew, Antony, A Rational Animal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Chapters 8–9.Google Scholar

4 Quoted from the Preface to Capital at p. 51Google Scholar of The Poverty of Historicism.

5 See, again, Flew, , op. cit., Chapters 8–9Google Scholar. The relevant references to the works of Freud, and Jones, Ernest are given on p. 188.Google Scholar

6 For an exposition of this rather obvious but nevertheless crucial distinction see Flew, Antony, An Introduction to Western Philosophy (London: Thames and Hudson, rev. edn 1989), 120Google Scholar, or Thinking about Thinking (London: Collins Fontana, 1975)Google Scholar, 5.9 and 6.11. It is, surely, worth remarking by the way that Carr's dismissal of those who would ‘pronounce moral condemnation on the Charlemagnes, Napoleons and Stalins of history’ seems to be based in the main upon a failure to separate these two senses of ‘expect’; a failure here reinforcing the pervasive necessitarian belief that fully to explain is completely to exculpate.

7 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by Locke, John, Nid-ditch, P. H. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).Google Scholar

8 The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek, F. A. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 284.Google Scholar