Karl Popper – From Hegel's Critic to Pathfinder
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Dual Role
We have already encountered Karl Popper (1902-1994) – in Chapter 2, as a sharp critic of Hegel, whom he considered a forerunner of totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) devoted a devastating chapter to Hegel, in which Popper accused him of “historicism,” “essentialism,” and intellectual dishonesty.
But Popper was also a philosopher of science – and here lies an irony. His Logik der Forschung (1934) developed insights closer to Hegel than Popper himself was willing to admit.
Falsificationism
Popper’s basic idea: scientific theories cannot be verified (finally confirmed), but they can be falsified (refuted). A theory is scientific if it is in principle refutable – if it makes risky predictions that can fail.
This sounds anti-Hegelian – Popper emphasizes failure, refutation, not synthesis. But on closer inspection, structural parallels appear:
The primacy of criticism: Popper stresses that knowledge grows through criticism – through uncovering errors, not through accumulating confirmations. This is structurally dialectical: negation (refutation) is productive.
The openness of the process: for Popper, science is never complete. Every theory is “provisionally corroborated,” but in principle revisable. This corresponds to the insight that truth, for us, is a process, not a finished result.
Self-application: Popper’s falsificationism must apply to itself – is it itself falsifiable? This self-referentiality is a structure that Hegel places at the center of his Logic.
The Limit: Popper as Hegel’s Critic
Popper’s critique of Hegel in The Open Society is philosophically weak. He read Hegel through secondary sources (mainly through the Left Hegelians and their critics), did not understand the Logic, and confused time-bound statements (B-forms) with systematic structures (A-forms). His Hegel is a caricature – the “state philosopher” who deifies the Prussian monarchy and despises freedom.
But Popper’s influence was enormous. For an entire generation, the rule held: whoever had read Popper no longer needed to read Hegel – he was “finished.” This was a loss for philosophy that is only slowly being corrected.
Spiral Staircase
Popper’s critique of Hegel was treated in Chapter 2.2. Here we are interested in Popper as philosopher of science – as a transition from logical empiricism to Kuhn. Popper himself saw Kuhn as a relativist; Kuhn saw Popper as a naive rationalist. The truth lies – dialectically – in the mediation that Lakatos attempted.
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