Value and History: Bankrupt Philosophy of History and Transcendental Popperianism

Abstract: This paper argues that the fundamental failure of all grand historical narratives—from Hegel's metaphysical teleology and Marx's and Kojève's this‑worldly historical teleologies to Hayek's ostensibly anti‑teleological model of spontaneous order—is the same: each usurps the silent "law of being" by projecting a self‑consistent narrative constructed solely within the "law of cognition." Hayek's case receives extended scrutiny. After an initial formal critique, the paper dismantles his spontaneous‑order theory on both empirical and transcendental fronts. Empirically, the tulip mania is analysed as a structurally intensified tragedy of the commons, revealing that spontaneous order endogenously generates disorder. Behavioural‑economics findings—anchoring, endowment effect, loss aversion, overconfidence, confirmation bias, disposition effect, and noise trader risk—systematically undermine Hayek's presuppositions that price signals integrate dispersed knowledge and that market participants act as rational interpreters of those signals. The paper further shows that cultural evolution does not select for economic efficiency but for communicative contagiousness, as demonstrated by the group polarisation, reputational collusion, and narrative internalisation at work in the tulip mania. Austrian‑School corrections—subjective value theory, Misesian apriorism, and Kirznerian entrepreneurial alertness—are each shown to fail: subjective value theory collapses into radical perspectivism that destroys the very possibility of price‐as‐knowledge; Misesian transcendentalism conflates action‐category with substantive cognitive capacity and evades the philosophical challenges of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Husserl; entrepreneurial alertness proves to be a purely ex post, unfalsifiable immunisation strategy. Transcendentally, the paper argues that Hayek's market order constitutes a colonisation of the intersubjective field by one particular relational mode—equivalent exchange—which structurally excludes other relational modes without any justifiable ground, thereby committing a transcendental usurpation. After demonstrating the structural incompletability of Hegel's absolute spirit through set theory and the semiotic square, and revealing the isomorphic narrative structure shared by Marx and Kojève, the paper develops a "Transcendental Popperianism." This critical framework radicalises the Kantian thing‑in‑itself, Popperian fallibilism, and Derridean différance to establish an unbridgeable rupture between cognition and being. Knowledge is consequently redefined not as justified true belief but as a highly stable narrative accepted by a cognitive community and tested only in logical, social, and cultural fields. History, as a subset of being, remains silent; all philosophies of history that claim to have discovered its laws or direction are therefore bankrupt. Finally, the paper demonstrates that holistic blueprint engineering is structurally impossible: the subject, understood as a Humean bundle of perceptions, cannot sustain the long‑term identity of will required by any grand design, while the transmission of the blueprint is inevitably dissolved by the différance of meaning. Piecemeal social engineering emerges merely as a pragmatic tool for minimising the effects of différance, not as a superior form of rationality—and Popper's own methodological prohibition is itself an act of usurpation, immune to his own fallibilism. Keywords: historical teleology; transcendental Popperianism; law of cognition; law of being; différance; spontaneous order; piecemeal social engineering; intersubjective field; behavioural economics; tragedy of the commons; Austrian School; usurpation