Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The book has several different aspects, all of absorbing interest, including the detailed reconstruction of Popper's intellectual career and the depiction of the social and political milieu of Vienna between the wars.

Popper was the archetypal workaholic. Hacohen reports that he worked for 360 days of the year, all day, without the distraction of newspapers, radio or TV. Several times a month, even in old age, he worked all night and friends such as Bryan Magee would get an early morning call from Popper, bubbling with excitement to report on his latest ideas. Popper lived well out of London near High Wycombe and when Magee gained Popper's confidence he was invited to visit, taking the train to "Havercombe" (in Popper's heavily accented English). When I made the trip to Havercombe, Popper arranged to meet me at the station, carrying a copy of the BBC Listener, presumably to pick him out from all the other elderly gentlemen of middle-European extraction who might be thronging the platform at 2.00 on a Wednesday afternoon. In the event, he left the magazine at home and the kiosk had sold out so he had to buy The Times and fold it to the size of the Listener. Of course he was the only person in sight apart from the Station Master. Popper, then aged 70, had what his research assistant tactfully described as a "very positive" attitude to driving. Fortunately it was not far to his home and there were few other cars on the road. Safely home, our conversation laboured, and he frequently pushed a tray of choc-chip cookies towards me. Later he lamented to his assistant that I had eaten a whole weeks supply of his favorite cookies in one afternoon. These aspects of Popper are the other face of the man who some described as "the totalitarian liberal".

Hacohen has provided sufficient background to explain why Popper's ideas were so exciting for some people, and so threatening for others, though it was left to Bill Bartley in the 1960s to articulate the way that Popper had challenged the unstated and uncriticised assumption of "justificationism" which is the glue that holds together the ideas of the positivists and other "true belief" philosophers. Popper's lack of progress in the community of professional philosophers needs to be understood against the persisting background of justificationism, subjectivism and determinism which he has criticised in favour of critical rationalism, conjectural objective knowledge and non-determinism.

Hacohen has assembled a massive amount of material and a lesser talent in organization would have lost the plot among the details. Helped by a liberal quantity of headings sub-headings and his very clear exposition, he has kept his material under control and kept several balls in the air with superb aplomb. The several balls are Popper's diverse interests and the chaotic events that were going on around him in Vienna, not only among the intellectuals but also in Austrian politics.

These events forced Popper to flee to the other side of the world, to New Zealand, surely the antithesis of Vienna in most cultural, intellectual and political respects. There, his campaign for critical rationalism, objectivism and non-determinism was waged in political philosophy. His achievement in writing the two large volumes of "The Open Society and its Enemies" can be compared with the Battle of Britain, where young pilots held Hitler at bay in the skies over the English Channel. Popper daily patrolled the intellectual stratosphere, challenging Hitler's intellectual henchmen from Plato to modern times. This work would have been an amazing achievement under any circumstances, as it was it had to be done in the face of dreadful news from home (fourteen relatives died in the Holocaust), under the threat of Japanese invasion and against the resistance of his Professor who regarded his research and writing as theft to teaching time.

To conclude, this book is a wonderful piece of scholarship and its deserves to be read with close attention by anyone with a shred of interest in the ideas that have shaped the world today. With any luck Popper's ideas will help to shape the world tomorrow. I dissent from Hocohen's reading of Popper's ideas as a prop for social democracy, but anyone imbued with the spirit of critical rationalism can make up their own mind on that.

This book is actually worth six stars, so buy two copies, one for your local library.

We tend to see Karl Popper from a later perspective of the years of the Cold War. And yet his roots explain a number of enigmas surrounding his work.This is a very compelling and very useful portrait of the early years of Karl Popper in the age of Wittgenstein's Vienna, and the interwar years. The background of Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, for example, lies in the methodological debates of this prior era, and the background given in the book greatly illuminates some of this classic's oddities. Popper's youth and formative years, when he was a socialist,and a socialist soon confronted by socialist theories in action, are brought out against the background of the extraordinary period after World War I and the calamities swiftly following one another. Through all of this we see Popper's distinctly uncharacteristic and yet brilliant development as he becomes a philosopher of science, in counterpoint to the logical positivists, with whom he was always confused. All this coming to fruition in the mid-thirties and the onset of Nazism, as Popper joins the endless list of refugees from one of the most creative cultural generational series of modern times. In fact the portraits of many of the figures of this time, with many of whom Popper interacted, makes up a striking portrait of cultural history. One is oddly reminded of the inverted resemblance to George Lukacs, another scion of this era, whose different response and fate to one and the same chaotification and reification of theory in practice echoes as a mirror image the swiftly conservatized The Poverty of Historicism, beside the equally classic The Open Society and its Enemies. The brilliant tactics of these works should make the history told by Hacohen of interest to any leftist, for the lines of counterargument stand clear, if only the point Popper made is understood. And, indeed, this greater context shows perhaps the limitations of these works. The critique of historicism is really about what Popper called the Oedipus effect, the interaction of theory and practice, and the outcome of the 'future of theory'. That future was the present, and had no theory, save that in the minds of those embarking on disorderly realizations, and this was the present of the Young Popper, a living figure indeed before the older conservative we know. Popper's courage in attacking Plato was so peculiar to some, that we forget that it attempted a virtual course in universal history itself, in that the birth of philosophy has always been haunted by the Platonic rejection of democracy. And therein lies a flaw in Popper's thinking,perhaps, if we can find a universal history that is not an historicism. We can, but that is another book. Fascinating work, and for many reasons, not least the curious history of logical positivism, and the suggestion of the unseen Kantian strain in Popper's thinking, often not evident in the surface accounts. Recommended.

Malachi Hacohen as written a great biography that both covers the personal has well as the philosphical development of one of the 20th century's greatest minds. This is a big book in every sense of the word, big in ideas, big in scope. One of the by products of reading this book was to discover the immense impact that intellectuals from 1920's Austria and non germanic Central Europe had upon, not just philosphy, but also economic and political developments in the Anglo Saxon world. People such as Hayek, Drucker, Polyani, Tarski, Neurath, Mises and many more have had a profound effect upon the thinking of both the Right and the Left in the US and Britain. One of those books which one can honestly say the reader will be much wiser after finishing it.