Historicism and Knowledge

Robert D'Amico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317281733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A critical account of the case for historicism from Popper to Foucault, this volume, originally published in 1989, shows the viability of an historicist account of knowledge by replying to traditional objections and the need for defenses of realism and reference at the heart of most alternatives to historicism. The book provides insights to those in philosophy as well as literary criticism, intellectual history, history of science, and cultural criticism.

1

Prophecy

In 1949 Leo Alexander, a physician, wrote an article “Medical Science Under Dictatorship” which recounts the abuses of medical procedures during the period of German Fascism.¹ Alexander argues that the early, and seemingly innocuous, abolition of controls over euthanasia and abortion created a moral “slippery slope.” The readiness of physicians to cooperate or look the other way during the Holocaust had its roots, Alexander argues, in these early decisions of medical convenience. Though the debate about the morality of euthanasia and abortion has continued to rage through the years, along with questions about responsibility for the Holocaust, it is not these arguments but another aspect of Alexander’s article that is instructive for the theme of my work.

Alexander speculates that the theoretical and intellectual context which rationalized Fascistic abuses was the “Hegelian doctrine of rational utility.” Social planning and the priority of the interests of the society over the individual, he suggests, supplanted traditional moral values and compassion. In Facist Germany, the belief in historical “destiny” combined with historical relativism, Alexander claims, ate away at traditional values and the moral intuitions.

Alexander’s claim that Hegel was a utilitarian and a relativist requires a detailed defense. But my particular interest in Alexander’s article is not for his philosophical analysis of Hegel. Alexander understood how intellectual debates about the meaning of history could suddenly become critical and decisive for the possibilities of social change.

Alexander’s article, like many conservative analyses before and after him, holds that sceptical, relativist, or critical doctrines of philosophy weaken a society’s traditions and that specifically the Hegelian doctrine of historicism was responsible for the moral collapse before totalitarianism. Alexander’s philosophical reflections were motivated by his personal shock at one of the worst manifestations of the modern age.

It is doubtful that Alexander read, for example, Karl Popper’s similar arguments in the early version of The Poverty of Historicism that appeared in the journal Economia during 1944–1945. Yet, in studies growing from his philosophy of science, Popper came to the same concerns as Alexander over a doctrine Popper named “historicism.” Though the word had been used before Popper gave it a precise and polemical meaning and no significant reflection on human knowledge can ignore Popper’s detailed criticism and analysis of this doctrine. Popper’s reading of Karl Marx, which will begin my discussion, becomes, in my view, the key to Popper’s philosophical critique of historicism as a position about knowledge and practice.

In his philosophical work, Popper has sought more than philosophy of science. He has investigated rationality in relation to studies of both society and nature. Popper shares with Marx the view that philosophy and science are not opposed to one another and that philosophy can make progress in the solution of problems once it abandons speculation. Both hold that there are specific social and political implications of otherwise abstract philosophy. Finally Popper’s criticism of Marx concerns a “deep” disagreement central to the modern age. Popper did later feel that The Open Society and Its Enemies, where he concentrates on the relationship of history and knowledge, was a “detour” in his philosophical career and that the book’s notoriety actually deflected attention from his philosophy of science.² But the book has emerged as a classic of modern philosophy. Written in an accessible and passionate style Popper’s often angry polemic addresses a wide audience with the view that important philosophical problems are, contrary to the fashion of the times, meaningful and resolvable. In this spirit he argues with Marx’s historicism as a persuasive and important position requiring a deep theoretical response. What then, according to Popper, was Marx’s accomplishment?

In Popper’s language Marx “conjectured” that all historical change was determined by the social mode of production, a structure combining the technological forces of production and social relations. From this simple but highly fruitful abstraction Marx outlined a general theory of explanation that dismissed individual or psychological motives, emphasized how action is shaped and constrained by social structure, and reversed the common sense view that societies change solely through their legal, political, or artistic activities. From these general views Marx worked out a periodization of history according to changes in production and a specific analysis of capitalism and its development.

Marx, however, wanted more than a retrospective explanation and sought to predict the direction of history from the nature of the production process. Popper, as will be discussed, considers such “deductions” of class struggle or revolution from his theory a case of Marxist prophecy rather than genuine scientific prediction. But Popper grants that when Marx restricted himself to specific analyses and specifically when he discussed the labor theory of value he produced a genuine scientific “institutional analysis” and a “theoretical success of the first order.”³ Therefore Popper begins by understanding Marx’s defense of the labor theory of value before he considers the historicism behind that theoretical approach.

Even though Popper prefers Marx’s more technical discussion of the labor theory of value over the broad social analyses for which Marxism is famous, Popper considers the labor theory of value defunct. In fact Popper considers it a contribution to Marx’s rehabilitation as a major philosopher to separate his contribution to philosophy of the social sciences from a weak economic theory Marx happened to champion. Even if critics of the labor theory of value are wrong, Popper concedes, it strengthens Marx’s overall position to establish “that its [Marxism’s] decisive historico-political doctrines can be developed entirely independently of such a controversial theory.”⁴ In understanding why Popper considers Marx’s defense of the labor theory of value redundant and unnecessary, Popper’s opposition to historicism emerges.

First of all, to correct a common misunderstanding, I must stress a reason Popper did not give for dismissing the theory. Popper did not consider the concept of value a metaphysical and therefore unscientific concept in economic theory. Popper never adhered to the positivist view that theoretical terms should be restricted to reports on observations or only introduced as a short hand for more lengthy lists of observation statements. As long as a theory was testable Popper put no conditions on its basic concepts, their elaboration, or metaphysical commitments.

As Popper was among the first to show, observations are built out of the fabric of theoretical systems.⁵ Thus Popper did not see any purpose in opposing concepts because they were not operationally defined or immediately correlated with observations.⁶ For Popper science does not require the elimination of all metaphysics, an impossible task anyway, nor is there any way to predict what kind of speculation, since any theoretical orientation goes far beyond sense experience, will generate a good scientific theory. The problem with Marx’s treatment of the value theory and its consequent link to historicism lies elsewhere.

The labor theory of value was designed to explain exchange by the measure of labor embodied in a commodity. But the nineteenth century economist David Ricardo, who influenced Marx’s formulation of economic theory, had noted an inconvenient circularity in the labor-commanded measure of value when wages were included within the theory.

If the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labor bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labor which that quantity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variation of other things: but they are not equal; the first is under many circumstances an invariable standard, indicating correctly the variations of other things; the latter is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it.⁷

Thus when the labor theory of value is applied to wages, either the wages are equal exactly to the labor embodied in them or they are not. If the two are equal then wages could act as a standard unlike all other commodities, whose values, according to the theory, fluctuate. But if wages were such a special commodity or measure of exchange the labor theory of value itself would no longer be necessary. However, if wages and the labor embodied in them are unequal and wages fluctuate like other commodities, that condition appears to violate the labor theory of value. Ricardo realized that though he measured the value of a commodity in terms of the quantity of labor in it, a rise or fall in wages did not, as one would conclude, change the value of products.

Marx took over Ricardo’s conceptual problem but Marx considered the labor theory of value as a human, conventional arrangement, not a natural necessity. Marx’s relationship to the theory was, therefore, ambiguous. Though he defended the theory he considered its categories historical reflections of a society whose economic forces and laws appeared “natural.” At the level of appearance, in Marx’s view, the categories of classical economics concealed socially created inequalities. While Marx thought that he demonstrated how to salvage the labor theory of value from its internal flaws, his aim was also to demonstrate that modes of exchange were socially constructed arrangements. Marx argued that the labor theory of value, without his critical analysis of its categories, represented social structure as the inevitable result of human psychology or immutable laws of nature. Therefore it was an account of society which denied the possibility of social change and implicitly supported those who benefited from society’s inequities.

Marx’s contribution, in his own estimation, was the distinction between labor time and labor power. The circularity pointed out by Ricardo occurs because the original theory of value confused, according to Marx, the buying of labor power and the quantity of labor time. What the buyer of the commodity purchases is labor power (that is the commodity bought with wages) and the value of that commodity is measured, like all others, by the quantity of labor time necessary to reproduce the laborer. Once that distinction was admitted the feared circularity of the original theory’s treatment of wages disappeared. Further Marx thought his distinction showed how the difference between the wages as measured by labor time and the value produced by labor power when utilized in the production process accounted for the excess value (surplus value) that capitalism appropriated as profit.

Popper concedes that the clarification of surplus value was a “clever” accomplishment. But Marx went on to derive certain historical tendencies from the theory. Popper calls Marx’s attempted extrapolation a study of the “logic of the [historical] situation.” Capitalism intensifies labor productivity so that fewer hours of the working day (labor time) are paid in wages for labor power. The orientation of modern capitalism toward technological change and innovation has, according to Marx, a structural or “institutional explanation.” The logic of the situation demands that capitalist production either lengthen the hours worked or produce more for each hour of wage. The more efficient strategy is to get more productivity in each hour of labor power (what Marx calls relative surplus value) and that is done by introducing technology into the labor process. Popper praises these structural historical explanations by Marx because they are examples of how social theory can progress in understanding without appealing to some psychological or philosophical speculations about human nature, as in traditional political philosophy.

In rejecting a purely psychological or ethical account of social forces Marx was defending the autonomy of social science. Popper felt a kinship with Marx’s strategies in this case because both thinkers opposed subjectivism in philosophy and social theory. Popper objects to the view that knowledge rests on certain special or privileged psychological acts of belief or perception. Marx also tried to dismiss philosophies which hypothesized a pre-social psychological state of nature, what Marx called, after Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, the “unimaginative conceits of eighteenth century Robinsonades” about natural life. These approaches had human subjectivity precede the formation of society. In a famous phrase Marx stated that human consciousness does not determine social existence, rather social existence determines consciousness. Popper understands Marx as criticizing the “poverty” of psychologism.

It must be admitted that the structure of our social environment is manmade in a certain sense: that its institutions and traditions are the work of neither God nor of nature, but the results of human actions and decision, and alterable by human actions and decisions. But this does not mean that they are all consciously designed, and explicable in terms of needs, hopes, or motives. On the contrary, even those which arise as the result of conscious and intentional human action are, as a rule, the indirect, the unintended, and often the unwanted byproducts of such actions.”⁸

Though Marx objected to the human costs of capitalist economic development he did not base his criticism on any evil intentions nor did he hope that such abuses would be removed by moral conversion. In rejecting morality Marx was not indulging some dour view of human nature but a non-psychological analysis. As Popper defends it, Marx’s structural explanations in history do not rest on the intentions, morals, or plans of any given class and thus are not conspiratorial analyses. On the contrary, Marx hoped to show through his theory why a social class acts as it does, has the values that it does, quite apart from individual motivations and personalities.

In spite of what Popper considers Marx’s successful defense of his “viewpoint” on history and society Popper argues at length against Marx’s central defense of the labor theory of value. First Popper holds that the labor theory of value is not necessary for the “institutional analysis” of social structure that Marx discovered and practiced. Second, the assumptions necessary to account for exploitation within capitalism render the labor theory of value redundant. Finally Marx’s real reasons for defending the labor theory of value are his acceptance of essentialist and historicist doctrines, which Marx mistakenly took as a guarantee of the scientific status of his work.

I consider the third point the most important of these three arguments as it concerns what Popper considers Marx’s fatal commitment to the “deep” historicist worldview. In the first two objections Popper argues that since one buys or sells as cheaply or dearly as possible, the labor-commanded measure of value is irrelevant and unnecessary. Selling above the “value” of the commodity, or buying below it, is merely an indirect, convoluted way of talking about how the market regulates exchange. What the term “value” tries to express and substantialize is simply the long term stability of “prices” as dictated by market mechanisms. Popper concludes that since the participants in economic exchange do not perceive the value component (they only perceive prices) and since the oscillations that value is supposed to regulate can be explained more efficently with only prices and a simple law of supply and demand the complexity of the concept of value can be avoided. For Popper then “the laws of supply and demand are not only necessary but also sufficient to explain all the phenomena of ‘exploitation’ which Marx observed – … Thus the value theory turns out to be a completely redundant part of Marx’s theory of exploitation; and this holds independently of the question of whether the value theory is true.”⁹

In this passage Popper raises a serious and complex set of philosophical questions about what constitutes a “good” theory. He seems to argue that whether a theory is true or not is less important than its explanatory efficiency which can be measured by the simplicity of “fit” between the theory and the observed frequencies. Thus what Popper means by “redundant” in this case is that the complications of the value theory should be replaced by a simpler account. The approach Popper defends then is that a theory is a “tool” for measuring or predicting phenomena and our goal should be a useful and efficient tool since we can never know which account is true. Of course Marx did not take such an instrumental view of his task and in fact thought that success in the prediction of prices, for example, may have nothing to do with representing “what is really the case.” Marx, to use modern terminology, was a realist about philosophy of science. Therefore he could hardly have been persuaded by Popper’s appeal to the admitted simplicity of “laws” of supply and demand which Marx considered “superficial” economics. For Marx the labor theory of value represented the historical force that shaped society, namely human labor power, and thus was not redundant when compared with other, albeit equivalently useful economic theories.

In his later writings Popper concedes that his early works were unclear about the issue of scientific realism.¹⁰ The position o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Prophecy
• 2 Situational Logic
• 3 Conceptual Schemes
• 4 Rational Reconstruction
• 5 Historical A Priori
• 6 Objective Knowledge
• 7 Transcendental Turn
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index