I read Science in a Free Society. The first part is not exactly an easy read. The second part is a collection of his responses to reviews of Against Method which is amusingly withering in places.
Feyerabend sees Science as occupying a similar place in society as the Catholic Church did in the time of Galileo and being in similar need of knocking off its pedestal. Against Method is in some sense his 93 theses nailed to the church door.
Aristotle is the one he really likes, but he is a lot more sympathetic to Plato than Popper is. I think this is because he appreciates Plato's invention of literary genres rather than because he is convinced by the arguments in them.
He is also a lot more sympathetic to Hegel than Popper, again I think this is because he regards Hegel's dialectic as a hugely important development. If Feyerabend has a Method, its Argument, and Hegel's dialectic is argument leading to innovation. If there's a freedom he thinks is particularly fundamental, its the freedom to argue.
He sees Science as ill, constipated by undue subservience to Method, and prescribes a dose of anarchy, not because he is actually an anarchist, but because its the Hegelian antithesis and he feels the need to confront Science with it in order to progress to a healthier synthesis.
He regards Science as too dominant for Society to be free. I'm not sure to what extent he is playing the gadfly here, there aren't the reviews of reviews to reveal just how much of his position is conviction rather than rhetoric inspired by his convictions. His requirement for a free society is that all traditions have equal access to power in it. Its not good enough to allow women to participate equally in male society, female traditions have to have equal access to power. Its not good enough to have equal access for astronomers and astrologers to study with astronomers at university, they have to have equal access to study astrology with astrologers too. They might chose not to, other people aren't required to pay for them to do it, but "Astrology is unscientific" isn't a good enough reason to bar astrologers from universities.
Feyerabend would love people gluing themselves to roads. Not only are they protesting against the same sort of thing as he was protesting against, they are doing it a dramatically innovative way, and he would appreciate the drama even if he didn't agree with the aims of the protest.
He mentions Von Neumann but Turing and Goedel don't get mentioned at all, and in my opinion they demolished the sort of method he argues against in the 1930s. On the other hand, Science viewing itself as fundamentally superior rather than just another tradition, is still around. If anything I've reinforced my opinion that Against Method was flogging a dead horse, but I do agree with him that a society centred on a dead horse is unhealthy.
