The Laws of History by Graeme Donald Snooks

Author:Graeme Donald Snooks [Snooks, Graeme Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-09-05T19:05:54+00:00

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the evolution of human society can be only ‘a unique historical statement’ not a law. Obviously there is only one race of human beings, but there are many examples of different societies or civilizations which can be used to test such generalizations. History even provides two entirely separate and, for more than 15,000 years, non-interacting social systems—the Old and New Worlds prior to 1492. As shown in Part II, a set of laws can be derived from history that are valid for all these societies.

Second, Popper, quite incorrectly, dismisses the idea of the growth of human society as ‘holistic confusion’. In this he was influenced by the neo-Austrian school of economics, primarily Hayek, his colleague and friend at the London School of Economics, which maintained that our understanding of complex structures must be built up from our direct knowledge of the views, concepts, and actions of individuals, an approach known as ‘methodological individualism’. 20 This has a definite Cartesian flavour. This idea, in part also a reaction to the Keynesian divorce of macroeconomics from microeconomics, has been swept aside by modern economic theory. Yet Popper, in the mid-1950s, was committed to this minority and obsolete view. He asserts:

The idea of the movement of society itself—the idea that society, like a physical body, can move as a whole along a certain path and in a certain direction—is merely a holistic confusion…. Since there is no motion of society in any sense similar or analogous to the motion of physical bodies, there can be no such laws. 21

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