Popper Excoriated the Marxist View that History Had a Discernible Direction; No Historical Evidence Could 'Disprove' the Idea that History Was Moving through Stages towards the Goal of a Communist Society

The Cold War reassertion of objectivity which underpinned Namier’s overwhelming influence in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s also took place in the philosophy of science, where Sir Karl Popper, a philosopher of Viennese origin who dedicated much of his life to disputing the claims of Marxism to be a scientific doctrine, reasserted the objective nature of scientific knowledge in two highly influential works, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper argued that objective knowledge could best be approached through propositions for which one could specify the conditions under which they might be falsified. Theories – such as Marxism – which accounted for everything, and which could be adapted to any circumstances, were merely metaphysical; only theories which did not claim to explain everything, and yet which resisted attempts to prove them false, were truly scientific. Popper excoriated the Marxist view that history had a discernible direction, and was subject to laws; objective knowledge of history, he said, could only be obtained in respect of short- or medium-term developments, where it was clear what evidence was needed to falsify the interpretations put forward. No historical evidence could ‘disprove’ the idea that history was moving through stages towards the goal of a communist society, because every conceivable kind of evidence could be adapted to fit the theory if so desired. On the other hand, the idea that (for example) the First World War was caused by German aggression could be falsified (in theory at least), because it was possible to specify the kind of evidence that would be needed to prove or disprove it.

--Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, new ed. (London: Granta Books, 2012), Kindle e-book.