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In the debate between the natural science and the phenomenological or herme neutical approaches in the human sciences, a third alternative described by Husserl has been widely ignored. Contrary to frequent assumptions, Husserl believed that a purely phenomenological method is not generally the appropri ate approach for the empirical human sciences. Rather, he held that although they can and should make important use of phenomenological analysis, such sciences should take their basic stance in the "natural attitude," the ordinary commonsense lifeworld mode of understanding which cuts across the divergent abstractive specializations of natural science and phenomenology Human sci ence in the natural attitude, shorn of its naivete by phenomenological insight, would be the field of descriptive concrete sociocultural sciences capable of taking a truly explanatory approach to their subject matter, persons and personal formations. In practice, both Weber and Freud exemplify the method recom mended by Husserl.

Popper's thesis that the growth of knowledge lies in the emergence of problems out of criticism and takes place in an autonomous world of products of the human mind (his so-called world-3) raises two questions: (1) Why does criticism lead to new problems, and (2) Why can only a limited number of tentative solutions arise at a given time? I propose the following answer: Criticism entails an overlooked evolutionary world-3 mechanism, namely, the migration of piece meal conceptual schemes from one research tradition to another. Popper by passed the questions above because he relied very heavily on the selective power of criticism.

This article examines the relationship between the classical Marxist tradition and the conceptual roots of totalitarianism. Here totalitarianism is understood to entail the attempt to frame the developmental impulses of modernity within the logic of a premodern political imaginary—defined as internally homogenous and transparent to itself. In the first part, we take issue with those who try to distinguish between the thought of Marx and Engels, and who insist that it is only in Engels's thought that the traces of a totalitarian politics might be found. In the second section, we outline briefly the context within which Marx's thought was developed, after which we argue that Marx's vision of communism is dependent on the three-phase vision of historical process which he inherited from Hegel. Without denying the historical peculiarities of the imposition of communism in Russia, we conclude that it is out of this latter vision of history that the conceptual roots of totalitarianism must be located.