Andrej Kristan retweetledi
I have seen at least five different people reposting Popper’s letter about Habermas to Raymond Aron, the first image in Daniel’s tweet. The letter is so harsh that it is easy to see why it keeps attracting attention. So some context and commentary:
1) In 1960, Popper was invited to open a discussion on the logic of the social sciences at a congress in Tübingen. In his opening address (1961), he presented 27 theses. Adorno was invited to reply.
2) Ralf Dahrendorf was at the Tübingen session and later wrote a report on it. He says the organizers wanted a real confrontation between Popper and Adorno, but it never really happened. It disappointed everyone.
3) Habermas wrote a long paper criticizing Popper as a “positivist,” and Hans Albert, a Popperian, wrote replies to Habermas.
4) All of this was collected in a 1969 volume titled Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, translated into English as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (1976).
In 1970, the TLS published a review of the Positivismusstreit volume. Popper disliked it and wrote a letter to the editor titled “Dialectical Methodology” (the third image in Daniel’s tweet). This was the first time Popper wrote about Habermas. After reading Popper’s TLS letter about the volume, Raymond Aron wrote to Popper (the second image in Daniel’s tweet), and then the famous letter dunking on Habermas came out (the first image in Daniel’s tweet).
Popper says that Raymond Aron suggested he expand this letter into a fuller critique, which he did. The result was the essay “Reason or Revolution?”, later included in the English translation of the Positivismusstreit volume (1976) and reprinted in Popper’s The Myth of the Framework. It contains the famous passage in which Popper takes a quotation from Adorno, selected by Habermas, and translates it into simpler language (first image below).
There is also an overlapping text titled “Against Big Words,” published in Popper’s book In Search of a Better World. It was originally a confidential letter that Popper wrote to Klaus Grossner. In this letter/chapter, Popper does the same 'translation', now also with Habermas (second and third image below!).
People sympathetic to critical theory usually read Popper’s letter to Aron and call him names. People unsympathetic to the Frankfurt School read it and say Popper is spot on. Geoffrey Stokes perhaps did better in his piece on the similarities between Popper and Habermas published as a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Popper. He argues that, despite the hostility, their philosophies converged over time, and not only politically.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins@daniel_dsj2110
A letter exchange between Karl Popper and Raymond Aron regarding the “Positivism Debate” in which Popper refers to Adorno and Habermas as lunatics and Aron calls Marcuse a sophist (1970):
English
