MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 1957
Published by Routledge and Kegan Paul
First edition
Collection M HKA, Antwerp

Although the text only appeared in book form in 1957, The Poverty of Historicism is actually Karl Popper's original attack on historicism. The three-volume essay with the same title already appeared in 1944 and 1945, in the international journal Economica. Popper criticises the 'historicist doctrine' of the social sciences, which states that we can only understand a social group by knowing the internal principles that determine the development of the group. He links this to holism, the belief that the individual is mainly determined by the group to which she/he belongs. Popper contrasts this with an individualism that considers social groups as the sum of their members, and social developments as a result of actions by individuals, usually unplanned and therefore also unpredictable. He strongly opposes all systems that only use people and people's lives as a means to achieve a certain goal. Popper rejects large-scale planning of economic-social structures by regimes that base their action on historicism and the predictions of the future linked to it. As an alternative, he introduces the concept of 'piecemeal social engineering', in which small and reversible changes are made in the structures of society. In contrast to major adjustments, the effect of which becomes invisible due to the future's unpredictability, small social actions are verifiable and falsifiable, and we can learn from them.