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Karl Popper, Historicism and Methodological Essentialism
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper criticizes the social sciences for their methodological essentialism, as opposed to the natural sciences, which use methodological nominalism.

"...nowadays, methodological nominalism is fairly generally accepted in the natural sciences. The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part treated by essentialist methods. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for their backwardness."

In plain terms, the essentialist asks "What is...?", where the nominalist asks "How does...?". In Popper's critique, social science's use of an essentialist methodology enables the historicist perspective of its practitioners, most notably Karl Marx, whom he covers extensively in Volume 2. Historicism, Popper argues, is the basis for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government. He writes that historicists "assert...that it is, in particular, the task of the social sciences to furnish us with long-term historical prophecies. They also believe that they have discovered laws of history which enable them to prophesy the course of historical events".

Popper here uses the term "essentialism" in its Platonic meaning; Volume 1 is entitled "The Spell of Plato". But he arrives at Plato in reverse. In writing his original 1936 paper The Poverty of Historicism, Popper's critique of historicism did not originally refer directly to Platonism or essentialism. Only in revising that paper and developing The Open Society... was he "...struck by the parallelism between Aristotle's report and the analysis I had carried out... In this way, I was reminded of the roles of Heraclitus and Plato in this development."

Popper notes that his criticism of Plato is confined merely to the latter's historicism and vision of a "best (political) state". "Although I admire much in Plato's philosophy...[it] is the totalitarian tendency of Plato's political philosophy which I shall try to analyse, and to criticize."