B. Criticisms by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism
1. The Marxist position is a type of historicism – “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principle aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the rhythms of patterns the laws or the trends that underlie the evolution of history.
2. Since we never fully understand “social wholes” some important factors always are being ignored; large-scale predictions about society are prophecies rather than scientific predictions. In the social sciences, only piecemeal social engineering is possible.
3. Social wholes are not greater than the sum of their parts; so society is an aggregate of individuals, “the task of social theory is to construct and to analyze our sociological models carefully in descriptive or nominalistic terms, that is to say “in terms of individuals”, of their attitudes, expectations, relations, etc. – a postulate which may be called “methodological individualism.”
4. No laws of historical revolution are discoverable because there can be no law to describe a unique process.
5. Historical trends are not laws. Trends are not changeable; so hey cannot satisfy the criterion of universality for laws. The dependence of trends upon changing conditions demands that a researcher constantly seek out possible conditions, which alter description and explanation; but the historicist ignores these possible conditions.
6. Large scale social predictions are untestable. IN piecemeal social engineering here is a careful lying out of expectations and procedures whereby the social scientist and lean from mistakes; such careful laying out does not occur in the historicists construction of grand theories. Large-scale social changes inevitably arouse resistance among the people affected but this fact does not constitute as disconfirmation of the particular social hypothesis from the historicist standpoint.
