Foreword

Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) was born in Vienna, and was a student at the University there throughout the 1920s. His early thinking was influenced by the activities of the communists and the Social Democratic party, by his work with the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, by Eddington’s eclipse experiment to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and later by his acquaintance with members of the Vienna Circle. Though never a member of the Circle, and usually in sharp disagreement with their main doctrines, he shared their enthusiasm for science and for logic. Replacing their verifiability criterion of meaning with the falsifiability criterion of demarcation of empirical science, he put forward a solution to Hume’s problem of induction. More generally, he proposed an anti-authoritarian approach to human knowledge, in which criticism is stressed and justification abandoned.

The application of these ideas from the theory of knowledge to political thought resulted in the two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies. The book was completed while Popper was a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he had taken up a post in 1937 in order to escape National Socialism, soon to overpower not only Austria but most of Europe.

The Open Society and Its Enemies champions the cause of democracy, which it shows to be the only form of government in which human reason can prevail and non-violent reform can take place. Popper launched a merciless attack on those he saw as the greatest enemies of democracy: Plato, Marx and Hegel.

Volume I is concerned with The Spell of Plato. Popper vigorously argued that Plato was guilty of the ‘dangerous habit of historical prophecy’ and that his political thought was totalitarian in nature. Volume II critiques Marx and Hegel. By analysing their work, Popper was able to expand his theory of the connection between historicism and totalitarianism which he found equally repugnant as obstacles both to the rule of democracy and of reason.

Popper later called this book his ‘war work’. It was published in 1945 just as the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe were being installed. Its author became something of a hero to dissidents in the communist countries, and despite his forceful rejection of the idea that the course of human history can be foretold, his work was hailed as prophetic when the communist regimes collapsed in the early 1990s. A Russian translation was published in 1992 and became a best-seller. The political stance of the book, though fundamentally in the social democratic tradition, has been endorsed by many conservative politicians in Britain and Europe. Popper himself steadfastly refused identification with any political party.

In his later work, Popper returned to problems in the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of science and many other areas. Up until his death he continued to reflect on the Greek philosophers from the PreSocratics onwards; the treatment of Plato (as also of Hegel and Marx) sprang from the deepest roots of his thinking.

Karl Popper received many academic and other honours; he was knighted in 1965 and created Companion of Honour in 1982. His books have been translated into over thirty languages. Many of his papers, lectures and correspondence are being prepared for publication through Routledge.