 These lead to what Popper calls “The Historicist Doctrine of the Social Sciences”, the views (a) that the principal task of the social sciences is to make predictions about the social and political development of man, and (b) that the task of politics, once the key predictions have been made, is, in Marx’s words, to lessen the “birth pangs” of future social and political developments. Popper thinks that this view of the social sciences is both theoretically misconceived and socially dangerous, as it can give rise to totalitarianism and authoritarianism—to centralised governmental control of the individual and the attempted imposition of large-scale social planning. Against this, he advances the view that any human social grouping is no more (or less) than the sum of its individual members, that what happens in history is the (largely unforeseeable) result of the actions of such individuals, and that large scale social planning to an antecedently conceived blueprint is inherently misconceived—and inevitably disastrous—precisely because human actions have consequences which cannot be foreseen. Popper, then, is an historical indeterminist, insofar as he holds that history does not evolve in accordance with intrinsic laws or principles, that in the absence of such laws and principles unconditional prediction in the social sciences is an impossibility, and that there is no such thing as historical necessity.