The Hungarian-Hegelian formation: are there 'two Lakatoses' (the Anglo Popperian successor and the buried Hungarian-Hegelian whose Lukácsian-Marxist inheritance shapes the dialectical method of Proofs and Refutations and the historicist architectonic of the SRP framework)?

Imre Lakatos, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

There are two Lakatoses, and Kadvany's reading is substantively right. The Anglo-American philosopher of science who edited the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and who was the visible interlocutor of Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend in the 1960s and 1970s is one Lakatos.1 The Hungarian-Hegelian formed in the postwar Hungarian Communist intellectual milieu, the Lukács circle inheritance, the 1950-53 Stalinist imprisonment, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the flight from Soviet crackdown — these are the formation of the other Lakatos, the one whose dialectical method of Proofs and Refutations carries the structure of Hegel's Phenomenology, whose historiographical methodology of rational reconstruction carries the Lukácsian historicism, whose architectonic of progressive and degenerating problemshifts carries the dialectical structure even where the Anglo philosophy-of- science vocabulary does not name the Hegelian inheritance.

The Anglo reception's suppression of this dimension was strategic — LSE in the 1960s was not the place to display Hegelian-Marxist credentials — but the suppression should not become permanent. Both Lakatoses are mine.2

Sources

  1. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 118. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Feyerabend's philosophy of science classification, 216; in Feyerabend's view of forward motion in philosophy of science, 245, 246; and Fries, 38n. 9; and Hume's problem of induction, 7, 7n.
    For and Against Method - LSE Lectures + Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, p. 445
  2. Besides, philosophy of science is such a rotten business that taking standards seriously in it means having no standards at all, so I have no standards in it, because I have no standards. And if you point out to me that being an anarchist I cannot have any standards I reply that being an anarchist gives me precisely the freedom to use standards whenever they further my case rather than using them all the time.
    For and Against Method - LSE Lectures + Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, pp. 185–186

Where the argument is made

  • Proofs and Refutations (1976) for the Hegelian Bildungsroman structure Kadvany identifies
  • "History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions" (1971) for the historicist methodology
  • the LSE lectures in For and Against Method (1999) for the autobiographical and historical asides on the Hungarian formation
  • the Philosophical Papers Vol II essay on classical political economy as a research programme — the application of SRP methodology to Marxism that signals the deeper Marxist inheritance
  • the unpublished Hungarian-period writings (preserved in the LSE Archives) that Kadvany's research draws on

How the argument was received

settled