ABSTRACT
While Popper was working on The Poverty of Historicism, the problem of essentialism led him to make some points about Plato’s Republic which struck his friends as rather obscure. He therefore set about developing this part into the nucleus of what would become an imposing two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. The author himself remarks that although it was complementary to the book on historicism, it was ‘no doubt the more important one’ (UQ: 91). For it showed with a wealth of argument and example that the critical method typical of science can be generalized into ‘the critical or rational attitude’, so that it can also be placed at the basis of the life of society [ibid.].
