ABSTRACT
Popper rst deployed the idea of situational analysis in an early draft of the Poverty of Historicism, which was ultimately published in 1957 (see Popper 1982). There, Popper attacked the idea that history could be understood as the working out of universal laws (such as Marx’s laws of historical materialism) analogous to the laws of physics or as expressions of transindividual “spirits of the age.” Historical laws cannot serve as the focus of a theoretical science, as the only plausible candidates are “trivial and used unconsciously” (Popper 1957, 150). The goal of historical explanation, in contrast to theoretical explanation, is to account for singular outcomes; and singular outcomes depend on a complex of partial causes and initial conditions that run into the remote past, most of which are of little interest. Historical interpretation for Popper is a matter of adopting a “point of view” (Popper 1957, 151). Situational analysis might provide the basis for such an interpretation, tracing the interaction of a dominant motivation with principal constraints. The constraints, in fact, provide most of the explanatory force. Because of the limited point of view and the focus on singular outcomes, such accounts, which are sometimes wrongly mistaken for theories, rarely result in testable hypotheses and, therefore, while valuable nonetheless, cannot be regarded as scientic.
