This book compares Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek systematically and critically assessing their contribution to the political philosophy of the Open Society and is controversial in that they are defended in areas where they are usually criticized.

Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek are remembered as two of the twentieth century’s greatest proponents of open society. However, over the years, Hayek’s ideas have tended to be favoured over Popper’s in both academic and political discussions. This book aims to improve understanding of Popper’s and Hayek’s philosophies by explaining their differences, and whilst doing so, to encourage liberal political philosophers to take a better-informed and more sympathetic look at Popper’s ideas about open society. Popper and Hayek differed in subtle but fundamental ways about rationality, economism, and democracy. They thus differed about whether and to what extent society is well served by deliberate attempts at social engineering and government intervention in the economy. They also differed about whether democracy is better served by institutions designed to elect the best leaders, or by institutions designed to protect us against the leaders we elect. And they differed, perhaps most importantly, about whether we should value freedom as a means to prosperity or an end-in-itself. This book argues that Hayek’s views about rationality, economism, and democracy are fundamentally at odds with Popper’s3⁄4 and perhaps even with open society itself—and that the unintended consequences of Hayek’s views may actually pose a threat to Popper’s vision of a liberal and free open society.

In this long-awaited volume, Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner bring to light Popper's most important unpublished and uncollected writings from the time of The Open Society until his death in 1994. After The Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings reveals the development of Popper's political and philosophical thought during and after the Second World War, from his early socialism through to the radical humanitarianism of The Open Society. The papers in this collection, many of which are available here for the first time, demonstrate the clarity and pertinence of Popper's thinking on such topics as religion, history, Plato and Aristotle, while revealing a lifetime of unwavering political commitment. After The Open Society illuminates the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is essential reading for anyone interested in the recent course of philosophy, politics, history and society.

The key values of the Open Society – freedom, justice, tolerance, democracy, and respect for knowledge – are increasingly under threat in today’s world. As an effort to uphold those values, this volume brings together some of the key political, social and economic thinkers of our time to re-examine the Open Society closely in terms of its history, its achievements and failures, and its future prospects. Based on the lecture series Rethinking Open Society, which took place between 2017 and 2018 at the Central European University, the volume is deeply embedded in the history and purpose of CEU, its Open Society mission, and its belief in educating skeptical, but passionate citizens.

The Political Thought of Karl Popper offers a controversial treatment of Popper's ideas about politics, informed by Shearmur's personal knowledge of Popper together with research on unpublished material in the Popper archive at the Hoover Institute. While sympathetic to Popper's overall approach, Shearmur offers criticism of some of his ideas and suggests that political conclusions should be drawn from Popper's ideas which differ from Popper's own views. Shearmur introduces Popper's political ideas by way of a discussion of their development, which draws upon archive material. He then offers a critical survey of some of the themes from his Open Society and Poverty of Historicism, and discusses the political significance of some of his later philosophical ideas. Wider themes within Popper's philosophy are drawn on to offer striking critical re-interpretations of his ethical ideas and social theory. The book concludes with a discussion which suggests that Popper's views should have been closer to classical liberalism than they in fact were.

This 2001 biography reassesses philosopher Karl Popper's life and works within the context of interwar Vienna.

Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result. In the book, Popper condemned Plato, Marx, and Hegel as "holists" and "historicists"--a holist, according to Popper, believes that individuals are formed entirely by their social groups; historicists believe that social groups evolve according to internal principles that it is the intellectual's task to uncover. Popper, by contrast, held that social affairs are unpredictable, and argued vehemently against social engineering. He also sought to shift the focus of political philosophy away from questions about who ought to rule toward questions about how to minimize the damage done by the powerful. The book was an immediate sensation, and--though it has long been criticized for its portrayals of Plato, Marx, and Hegel--it has remained a landmark on the left and right alike for its defense of freedom and the spirit of critical inquiry.

From a Nobel Laureate economist, a collection of essays outlining ideas on political theory, economic freedom and epistemology. Following on F. A. Hayek’s previous work Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas collects some of Hayek’s most notable essays and lectures dealing with problems of philosophy, politics and economics, with many of the essays falling into more than one of these categories. Expanding upon the previous volume the present work also includes a fourth part collecting a series of Hayek’s writings under the heading “History of Ideas.” Of the articles contained in this volume the lectures on “The Errors of Constructivism”and “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” have been published before only in German, while the article on “Liberalism” was written in English to be published in an Italian translation in the Enciclopedia del Novicento by the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana at Rome.

This is one of the most comprehensive collections of critical essays to be published on the philosophy of Karl Popper.