The Poverty of Historicism
Karl Popper
 The book is a treatise on scientific method in the social sciences. Popper defines historicism as: “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim…”. “The belief… that it is the task of the social sciences to lay bare the law of evolution of society in order to foretell its future… might be described as the central Historicist doctrine.”. He distinguishes two main strands of historicism, a “pro-naturalistic” approach which “favours the application of the methods of physics”, and the “anti-naturalistic” approach which opposes these methods. The first two parts of the book contain Popper's exposition of historicist views (both pro- and anti-naturalistic), and the second two to criticism of them. Popper concludes by contrasting the antiquity of historicism (which, for example, Plato is said to have espoused) with the claims of modernity made by its twentieth century adherents.