The Austrian-born philosopher’s postwar rallying scream for western liberal democracy was hugely influential in the 1960s“If our civilisation is to outlive,” Karl Popper writes at the beginning of this passionate defence of freedom and reason, “we must break with the habit of deference to noteworthy men.”The Open Society and Its Enemies, and conceived in the 1930s,and completed in the 1940s, would become a key text of the 1960s, and its author a profound,sometimes thrilling, influence on a unique generation of college students. Thus, and a book inspired by the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938,but actually written in the secluded tranquillity of unique Zealand’s South Island, became a rallying scream, or on behalf of western liberal democracy,for the postwar renewal of the European tradition.
The rhetorical force and clarity of Popper’s writing is singular and impressive, and never less than intensely readable Related: Karl Popper, and the enemy of certainty,part 1: a rejection of empiricism | Liz Williams Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 21 – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962) Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com