Karl Popper, the enemy of certainty, part 3: rejecting politics as science

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/24/karl-popper-politics-as-science


'Karl Marx claimed that his system of political thought was predictive.' Photograph: Michael Nicholson/Corbis

Attempts to present political systems as scientific are increasingly regarded as old-fashioned: the "common sense" view suggests that politics is not scientific, cannot be reduced to a set of principles such that it can be applied across cultures and societies. Yet to an extent, this "common sense" view derives from the work of Karl Popper, from that early attempt by the latter to tackle claims of Marxism's "scientific" basis. Popper's harsher critics have claimed that it is only because his attention was turned to Marxism that he himself attracted further notice at all, but I would dispute this. I consider that Popper's critique of logical positivism is a devastating one; he would have had a place in the philosophy of science even without the critique of contemporary political philosophies.

That critique emerges out of Popper's rejection of verificationism and his espousal of falsificationism. Perhaps ironically, Popper was himself a teenage Marxist, attracted by the apparent explanatory power of the ideology. Yet, with a remarkable degree of insight, fuelled by tragic personal experience, he soon realised that this explanatory power was itself an illusion – a weakness of the ideology, rather than a strength, and it was this insight (derived ultimately from the much earlier work of Hume) that provided the driving force behind his own critique of verificationism, both within Marxism and beyond it. By the time he was 17, Popper said, he had realised that:

"I had accepted a dangerous creed uncritically, dogmatically… Once I had looked at it critically, the gaps and loopholes and inconsistencies in the Marxist theory became obvious…"
Marxism, Popper claims, is analogous to the psychological theories of Adler and pseudo-sciences such as astrology. His attack upon the ideology became two-pronged: Marxism principally consisted of unfalsifiable claims, and it was a historicism. It could not, therefore, be described as scientific.

"I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred... There was no conceivable human behavior which could contradict them."