Habermas and Popper

A new book on the Philosophy of Karl Popper which has been dubbed by a reviewer as "one of the best introductory accounts of Popper's philosophy" obviously contains some discussion of Habermas and Frankfurt School and its relation to the work of Popper. Here is the relevant passage from the review I mentioned above.

"There is a brief discussion of Popper's role in the "positivist dispute" and his interaction with other philosophers such as Horkheimer and Habermas. Part III considers Popper's metaphysical views concerning natural necessity, determinism, indeterminism, propensity, mind-body interaction, the doctrine of Worlds 1, 2 and 3, evolution, and the self.

The book does not get mired in the controversies between Popper and his contemporaries, from some of the logical positivists to his erstwhile colleagues or pupils. Nor does it cover some of the later Popper, especially those writings which have appeared posthumously in English but which were sometimes available earlier in German. For example, it does not delve into Popper's later work on the Presocratics. Keuth maintains that while Popper has many considerable achievements to his credit there are also some failures, especially in his late work. He makes a useful comparison with Kant whose claims about "transcendental knowledge" were known to be untenable even before Kant wrote on them. But just as Kant was an important influence in the Enlightenment, so Popper's critical rationalism is part of the twentieth-century continuation of that tradition. For German speaking Europeans, given their philosophical and political history since the time of Kant, the role of philosophers like Popper in the general intellectual culture is very important, a fact not often appreciated by those outside Germany and Austria.

...

Most of this review has focused on Keuth's account of Popper's philosophy of science. Whatever shortcomings Popper's view may have, it, or a revised version of it, has been influential in providing a critique of theories of society. This critique Popper began in his The Poverty of Historicism and his The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper claims that many historicists such as Marx and Marxists, and also many sociologists of knowledge, have a faulty understanding of the nature of science and its methods. Once they have a richer account of those methods, the bottom falls out of many of their arguments about the separate nature of the social sciences. This, amongst others, is a theme that appears in Part II of Keuth's book; it can be extended to objections concerning an alleged misplaced scientism advocated in the writings of members of the Frankfurt School, such as Horkheimer and Habermas. Keuth's book is not only a useful account of Popper's views on science, along with promising revisions of these views; it is also a useful prophylactic when applied to some sciences, especially the social sciences. Keuth's treatment of these issues in Part II, and the metaphysical issues in Part III not mentioned here, continue the standard found in Part I. Taken together they provide a fully rounded and fair assessment of Popper's philosophy and its continuing interest."

from here