Hayek and Popper: smothered giants of the Twentieth Century

Can we generate an adult debate on social issues instead of the simultaneously toxic and infantilized exchanges which pass for political commentary at present?

A vital function of education, especially higher education, is to put students in touch with the best that has been thought and written in the field of study. Something has gone wrong with the transmission of the thoughts of  Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper because a great many  educated  people have  either  not heard about  them at all or have taken on board fragments of misinformation put about by their enemies and opponents. That does not mean that their ideas have been discredited  and it is a very poor reflection on the performance of the universities that this has happened. It is no accident that we have a toxic climate of political debate at present, largely due to the success of the dominant tribe of leftwing/progressive intellectuals in  marginalizing thinkers who challenge their views.

In 1989 when there were only 21 universities I surveyed the undergraduate courses and reading lists in the schools of philosophy, sociology and politics (strangely neglecting economics).  The courses in philosophy and sociology were innocent of Hayek. In a few places he made an appearance in politics. Popper was general  absent in sociology  and occasionally present in politics. In philosophy he was taught as a transitional figure in the history and philosophy of science, between the positivists and more up to date thinkers like Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend.

An attempt to repeat the survey in recent times was frustrated by the proliferation of campuses and courses.  Instead I conducted a survey of the philosophy books in three public libraries in the part of Sydney where I live.  Hardly any of these books mentioned Hayek and so the research at this stage focussed on the treatment of Popper. Practically every book contained major misrepresentations of his ideas and the Top Ten Errors are listed at the end of this article.

The same errors turned up in a sample of books in the library at the University of Sydney. These are errors in explaining what Popper actually wrote, not to mention invalid criticisms of his ideas. Of course some authors did better than others but in recent years there has been a tendency for authors to leave Popper  out completely, which would be understandable  if all the misrepresentations were correct and the criticisms were valid.

Kevin Rudd demonstrated the state of play regarding Hayek’s ideas in a very impressive manner. First as the leader of the Opposition and then as Prime Minister, with access to the best brains in the nation, he misread Hayek’s political economy in such an absurd manner that he should have been a laughing stock among the educated public.  His lengthy papers in The Monthly had as much intellectual content as the photo of himself in Norman Gunston mode. But the public was mute, apart from some laughter in the vicinity of The Centre for Independent Studies and IPA.

Clearly Hayek’s classical liberalism, the economics of the Austrian school and the “critical rationalist" philosophy of Karl Popper have been marginalised and  students can easily pass through the universities  without getting a straight feed  on  those ideas.  As a partial corrective to this state of affairs and I have written a series of guides to Popper’s major works, and some of Hayek’s contribution, designed for  busy people who want short books which they can to read them in electronic form.  These are are available as ebooks from Amazon. More on Popper, Hayek and the classical liberal agenda can be found here.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Popper’s first book, Logik der Forschung (1935) took a quarter of a century to appear as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959.  In the meantime the Continental diaspora carried the philosophy of positivism and logical empiricism into the major universities of  Britain and North America where it is still taught as the orthodox or Received View  in many faculties.  Popper  was in New Zealand from  1937 to 1945 and  when he returned to London his influence at the London School of Economics was limited because most students of philosophy passed through other universities where very different schools of thought were dominant.

Even in English The Logic of Scientific Discovery is not a suitable introduction to Popper's ideas for a general readership and it was no match for Thomas Kuhn's  book on revolutions and paradigms that appeared soon after. 

The Popperian "turns"

Popper's basic ideas are clear enough when they are stripped of the supporting arguments that were required to deal with the obsessions of the positivists. It helps to see them in the light of a number of shifts in focus that Popper introduced. I have called these the six Popperian "turns" and they are explained in an appendix to the guides.

Possibly the most important is the "conjectural turn" to acknowledge that even our most respected and apparently well-supported theories (like Newtonian mechanics) may be found wanting in the light of  new developments. 

The second is to focus on objective, public or inter-subjective knowledge rather than the subjective beliefs which are the standard “stock in trade” of academic epistemology.

The third is the social turn to acknowledge the function of "rules of the game" of science; these are the methodological conventions like replication, repeatability, criteria for  statistical testing, and the protocols for reporting and publication, including peer review.  The social turn draws attention to influential aspects of the institutional context, such as the source of funding,  and it can be found in Popper's work well before Kuhn and the sociology of knowledge appeared.  He did not pursue that line in depth because his interests were elsewhere, but the signal that he gave was clear enough, especially near the end of The Poverty of Historicism and in Chapter 23 of The Open Society and its Enemies.

The fourth is to abandon extended conceptual analysis and the definition of terms, which he called essentialism.  Instead the focus should be on theories and practical policies, on the problems that need to be solved and the comparative merits of the rival contenders that claim to solve them.

The fifth is the evolutionary or biological turn.

The sixth is the revival of  metaphysics in the heart of the philosophy of science with a theory of “metaphysical research programs” which Lakatos borrowed and re-branded as a theory of scientific research programs.

None of those turns are unique to Popper but the combination is very powerful and his career can be described as the application of those turns to a wide range of problems in philosophy, physics  and the social sciences.

The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies.

Popper wrote these books in New Zealand while the outcome of the war was in doubt and 16 of his relatives perished in the Holocaust.  The Poverty of Historicism was published as a series of articles during 1944/45 and in book form in 1957. The final sections of this work describe  "Situational Analysis" which Popper proposed as a general methodology for the social sciences.

The Open Society and its Enemies, almost 800 pages, including 300 pages of notes in small print, should have been condensed by Readers Digest (like Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom).  It was  a major diversion from Popper’s primary interests which he took on as his contribution to the war effort.

 Conjectures and Refutations

The  1963  collection of papers in Conjectures and Refutations demonstrated the full range of Popper's interests more effectively than The Poverty and The Logic of Scientific Discovery.  However  by this time his stocks were falling under the influence of Kuhn and other critics such as Feyerabend and Lakatos . They energetically promulgated the Standard Errors of interpretation of Popper's ideas and so generations of students were  misled and some of these  student became authors and wrote misleading books.

The Appendices

Each volume of guides has  six common appendices.  The first is a brief account of Popper's career and his full list of books. The second explains the six "turns". The third describes how the misreading started from the very beginning because the positivists insisted on regarding him "one of them". The story spread that Popper's "falsificationism" was an alternative to the positivists "verificationism", a story that missed all the essential features of Popper's contribution that is summed up in the six turns.

Can the Fortunes of Hayek and Popper be Revived (in case it matters?)

If ideas matter, as Keynes claimed (and demonstrated with the ruinous success of his own ideas) then we  cannot afford to lose some of the best thinking of the 20^th century.  Around the world there are pressing problems of debt and social dislocation. An adult discussion is required  to address these problems and one would expect the  university-educated  intellectuals of the world to lead the way.  However  the intellectual debate has been corrupted and this is reflected in the simultaneously toxic and infantilized climate of political debate in Australia. So far as the educated public is concerned, the ideas of Popper and Hayek have been lost. It remains to be seen if they can be retrieved.

Top Ten Misreadings of Popper

The fourth appendix lists the Top Ten Misreadings, with examples and replies.

1. The Popper Legend. He was a kind of positivist and the falsifiability criterion is about meaning.

2.  Popper was a “naïve falsificationist”.

3. Failure to draw the distinction between falsifiability (a matter of logical form) and falsification (a practical matter).

4. "Scientists don't practice falsification".

5. Science would have come to a stop under the influence of falsificationism.

6. Popper's approach was static, unhistorical , obsessed with the right "method" and took no account of the social context of science.

7. The theory of conjectural knowledge cannot deliver justified beliefs (which we need) and we cannot get away from the need for induction.

8. Another argument against conjectural knowledge: the instrumentalist argument from technology.

9. The failure of Popper's theory of verisimilitude undermined his whole program.

10. Critical rationalism and positivism provide no platform to criticise and reform the social and political status quo. (Habermas).