HISTORICAL LAWS
123
against historicism are in the last analysis political arguments, and his
own position is in the last analysis a political position. The political di–
mension is not merely superimposed upon the methodological: the latter
rather reveals its own political content. The awareness of this relation–
ship and its outspoken development is a rewarding feature of Popper's
book.
The political implications of the critique of historicism center on
the notion of "holism." (The word itself seems to revolt against its for–
mation!) According to this notion (which Popper attributes to the anti–
naturalistic doctrines),
social groups must never be regarded as mere aggregates of persons. The
social group is
more
than the mere sum total of its members, and it is
also
more
than the mere sum total of the merely personal relationships
existing at any moment between any of its members.
Thus far this is a very harmless notion, and one may doubt whether
even the most radical empiricist would seriously deny it. Popper goes
on to distinguish two meanings of the word "whole": (1) those proper–
ties or aspects of a thing which make it appear an organized structure
rather than ,a mere "heap," and (2) "the totality of
all
the properties
or aspects of a thing, and especially of
all
the relations holding between
its constituent parts" (my italics) . The first meaning, used in Gestalt
theory, is acceptable to Popper, while he rejects the second as entirely
inapplicable to the social sciences.
It
is rejected because a whole in this
sense can never be described and observed, since "all description is ne–
cessarily selective." Nor can such a totality ever be the object "of any
activity, scientific or otherwise." Popper links methodological and poli–
tical totalitarianism: "It is for many reasons quite impossible to control
all, or 'nearly' all" the relationships embraced by society, if only "be–
cause with every new control of social relations we create a host of new
social relations to be controlled." "In short, the impossibility is a
logical
impossibility" (my italics); logically impossible because the at–
tempt would lead to an "infinite regression"-as it would in the study
of society as a whole. Popper himself seems to be somewhat uneasy;
he adds a footnote which says that "Holists may hope that there is a
way out of this difficulty by denying the validity of logic which, they
think, has been superseded by dialectic" and he says that he has tried
to "block this way" in his article "What is Dialectic"
(Mind,
vol. 49
N.S., pp. 403 ff). I do not know who the "holists" might be that enter–
tain such hope and that "may" deny the validity of logic, but the refer–
ence to the dialectic suggests that Popper is thinking of Hegel and the
Marxists who are thus charged with an illogical "totalitarian intuition"
