Sidney Hook
ON HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING
"Indeed, it is necessary to recognize as one of the principles
of any unprejudiced view of politics that everything is pos–
sible in human affairs."-Karl Popper,
The Open Society
and Its Enemies*
In a period when so many large predictions have proved false,
it is natural that the generous hopes based upon them should also
decline. A mood of renunciation or opportunist drift replaces a belief
in firm programs of social change. Sometimes, this is accompanied by
a profound distrust of any historical generalizations, even of any histori–
cal knowledge sufficiently reliable to guide intelligent action. Instead
of learning from the falsity of predictions to modify our hypotheses or
to revise our estimates of particular historical situations, the whole field
of historical knowledge becomes suspect.
A curious phenomenon then becomes observable in some quarters.
Since where nothing is determined, anything can be believed, doctrines
and ideals threatened with eclipse by the denouement of historical events
are passionately reaffirmed as valid directives for action at any place
and at any time. Determinism and determining tendencies are ban–
ished as bugbears. Fantasies are presented as if they were sober hypo–
theses. Political decisions no longer base themselves upon choices of
better or worse, for now all alternatives seem equally possible. We may
then with good conscience opt for the best even if it means a type of
struggle against the better which insures the victory of the worst.
The quotation above from Karl Popper's talented but wayward
book expresses in an extreme form one type of reaction to those whom
he calls prophets of cultural determinism. Among them he includes such
disparate figures as Plato, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee. It
*
This work is divided into two volumes, of which
The Spell of Plato
is the
first, and
The Mighty Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath
the
second. It has been published by Routledge in London. The quotation is from
Vol. II,
p.
185.
231
