ABSTRACT
Karl Popper lived through the turmoil of the Second World War and the political unrest in Austria that preceded its annexation to Germany, the Anschluss. He managed to leave his native Austria before Hitler arrived there, but it was news of this event that triggered Popper to write The Open Society and Its Enemies. Jewish by descent, though not religion, he realised the implications. By this time he was living in New Zealand. While there he channelled his energies into rethinking the history of political thought, writing his polemical book that diagnosed the intellectual roots of totalitarianism and the sort of society that might be able to resist its rise. The Open Society and Its Enemies ostensibly focuses on the philosophers Plato, Hegel and Marx, but in fact ranges far more widely than this might suggest. Popper’s writing gains a sense of urgency and poignancy from the wartime conditions in which he wrote it, with the fate of Europe undecided and the rise of Fascism still unchecked; it was first published in 1945 as Europeans were coming to terms both with the destructive power of political authoritarianism and the need to rebuild societies in ways which would immunise them against a recurrence of such events. Shortly after publishing the book he took up a post at the London School of Economics.
