Debate
The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology
1961 · Should the social sciences test their theories like any other science, or can society only be understood – and criticised – as a contradictory whole to which the researchers themselves belong?
At a working session of the German Sociological Association in Tübingen in October 1961, Karl Popper presented “Die Logik der Sozialwissenschaften” (The Logic of the Social Sciences) in 27 theses, and Theodor W. Adorno replied with a co-paper of almost the same title. From 1963 Jürgen Habermas and Hans Albert carried the argument further in a sharp exchange of essays, and in 1969 the contributions appeared together as “Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie”. Popper called this title misleading: he had criticised the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle since the 1930s and did not regard himself as a positivist. At stake were the method of the social sciences, the role of values in research and the charge, made by Adorno and Habermas, that a science confined to testable statements must end up defending the existing order.
Positions
Critical rationalism
Popper’s theses start from the tension between our knowledge and our ignorance: all science, natural or social, begins with problems and advances by proposing tentative solutions and trying to refute them. Objectivity lies not in the neutrality of individual researchers, who always have values and interests, but in public, mutual criticism. Hans Albert defended this view against Habermas (“Der Mythos der totalen Vernunft”, 1964): appealing to an untestable social “totality” shields dialectical claims from criticism, whereas critical rationalism extends criticism to values and political practice as well. In “Reason or Revolution?” (1970) Popper complained that his theses had not been discussed, only labelled “positivist”.
Held by
- Karl Popper1902–1994
Dialectical critique of society
Adorno answered that society is not a field of isolated problems but a contradictory totality that no method borrowed from the natural sciences can grasp; method must follow its object, and society becomes a “problem” only for someone who can conceive of it as other than it is. Habermas sharpened the point in 1963 and 1964: a theory of science that admits only testable statements leaves the question of how we ought to live to mere decision and so cuts reason in half – a “positivistically bisected rationalism”. Social science, he argued, must reflect on the interests that guide it, as he later set out in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).
Held by
- Theodor W. Adorno1903–1969
- Jürgen Habermas1929–2026
A dispute that never quite met?
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his remarks on the Tübingen discussion (1962), regretted that it had lacked the intensity the real differences would have warranted; the two speakers had seemed surprisingly close. Later research separates the time-bound polemics from the lasting questions. Hans-Joachim Dahms (Positivismusstreit, 1994) reconstructed, partly from archival sources, the earlier clashes between the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle in exile in the 1930s and 1940s, and Geoffrey Stokes (2016) points to convergent arguments in Popper and Habermas for a “postmetaphysical universalism”.
Read more
- Theodor W. Adorno (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Critical Theory (Frankfurt School) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Karl R. Popper: Reason or Revolution? (European Journal of Sociology 11, 1970)
- Hans-Joachim Dahms: Positivismusstreit (Suhrkamp, 1994; in German)
- Geoffrey Stokes: Popper and Habermas – Convergent Arguments for a Postmetaphysical Universalism, in: Jeremy Shearmur, Geoffrey Stokes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Popper (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made