Abstract

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.

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