Popper’s Critique of Marx’s Method

Abstract

Popper’s encounter with Marxism. Marxism, according to Popper’s own account, has played a quite special role in his life. In his autobiography¹ Popper recounts how, in the Vienna of the spring of 1919, he became convinced by communist propaganda and for ‘about two or three months’ regarded himself as a communist. But he further describes how some deaths during a pro-communist demonstration turned him against a view which claimed to be able to justify such deaths by allegedly scientific means. ‘The whole experience … led me to a life-long revulsion of feeling. … By the time I was seventeen I had become an anti-Marxist.’ Nevertheless, he goes on: ‘The encounter with Marxism was one of the main events in my intellectual development. … It made me a fallibilist, and impressed on me the value of intellectual modesty. And it made me most conscious of the difference between dogmatic and critical thinking.’ Thus Marxism bears the credit not only for helping to make Popper intellectually modest, but also, in conjunction with more or less contemporary encounters with the work of Alfred Adler and Freud, for his formulation and answer to the ‘demarcation-problem’: what is distinctive about scientific statements is that they are open to critical assessment, in particular to empirical refutation (falsiflability principle).