The philosopher Karl Popper devoted considerable attention to Karl Marx in Volume 2 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, originally published in 1945, and in this week’s column, I’d like to consider some of his insights.
Popper’s most fundamental criticism of Marx is expressed in this paragraph:
Why, then, attack Marx? In spite of his merits, Marx was, I believe, a false prophet. He was a prophet of the course of history, and his prophecies did not come true; but this is not my main accusation. It is much more important that he misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible for the devastating influence of the historicist method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of an open society.
Essentially, what Popper has in mind is that historicists think that the entire historical process has a final goal or outcome. People cannot change this process; it cannot be accelerated or altered. According to Marx’s version of historicism, the final goal of the historical process is socialism, but this cannot be achieved until all the productive possibilities of the previous stage—capitalism—have been realized. It would be a serious mistake to try to establish socialism before this, and the attempt to do so would necessarily fail.
Before he wrote his main book, Capital, in 1867, Marx had taken a more active view of what people could do to achieve socialism, and Popper much prefers what he calls this “pragmatist” phase of Marx. But the adoption of historicism changed all that: “Marx’s historicist view of the aims of social science greatly upset the pragmatism which had originally led him to stress the predictive function of science.”
To avoid confusion, we need to understand what Popper means by “predictive” here, because you might object that Popper is contradicting himself, in that he is condemning historicism for making predictions but also saying that science makes predictions. But there is no contradiction. The scientific sense of prediction, which Popper likes, has the form “if you want A, do B.” This can be tested by doing B and seeing whether A happens. The historicist sense of prediction, which Popper condemns, has the form “A will happen.” As Popper goes on,
It [Marx’s historicist view] forced him to modify his earlier view that science should, and that it could, change the world. For if there was to be a social science, and accordingly, historical prophecy, the main course of history must be predetermined, and neither good-will nor reason had power to alter it. All that was left to us in the way of reasonable interference was to make sure, by historical prophecy, of the impending course of development, and to remove the worst obstacles in its path. “When a society has discovered,” Marx wrote in Capital, “the natural laws that determine its own movement… even then it can neither overleap the natural phases of its evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by a stroke of the pen. But this much it can do; it can shorten and lessen its birth-pangs.
Marx attacked those who tried to imagine what the future stage of socialism would look like as “Utopianists”:
These are the views that led Marx to denounce as “Utopianists” all who looked upon social institutions with the eyes of the social engineer, holding them to be amenable to human reason and will, and to be a possible field of rational planning. These “Utopianists” appeared to him to attempt with fragile human hands to steer the colossal ship of society against the natural currents and storms of history. All a scientist could do, he thought, was to forecast the gusts and vortices ahead. The practical service he could achieve would thus be confined to issuing a warning against the next storm that threatened to take the ship off the right course (the right course was of course the left!) or to advising the passengers as to the side of the boat in which they had better assemble. Marx saw the real task of scientific socialism in this annunciation of the impending socialist millennium. Only by way of this annunciation, he holds, can scientific socialist teaching contribute to bringing about a socialist world, whose coming it can further by making men conscious of the impending change, and of the parts allotted to them in the play of history. Thus scientific socialism is not a social technology; it does not teach the ways and means of constructing socialist institutions. Marx’s views of the relation between socialist theory and practice show the purity of his historicist views.
It will be apparent to most readers of the Mises.org page that Popper’s view of “social technology” is mistaken. Popper thinks that it is wrong to take the alternatives confronting society to be the free market and full-scale, centrally-planned socialism. There is also a third system—i.e., interventionism—to be considered, and this is the alternative Popper wants. It consists of a semi-socialist state along the lines of the Swedish economy in the 1930s to the period in which Popper wrote, which combines substantial state ownership with a carefully regulated market. He unfortunately does not consider another sort of prediction, elaborated most carefully by Ludwig von Mises. This consists of predictions of the form, “If you institute interventionist measure X, it will fail to achieve the purpose you have in mind for it.”
Popper elsewhere professes great admiration for Mises, but he says that Mises did not trust him. It is easy to see why Mises took this attitude, as Popper does not address Mises’s argument, though it was available to him in numerous books and articles. Nevertheless, readers will find Popper’s discussion of Marx in The Open Society worth their attention.
