Karl Popper’s Response to 1938

When Karl Popper received the news of the events in Vienna, March 1938, in his New Zealand exile, he decided to start working on two books which became classics in political philosophy – his theory of an open democratic society. The volume deals with the lasting significance of Popper’s thoughts and aspects of the genesis of «The Poverty of Historicism» and the two volumes of «The Open Society». After an essay on Popper’s personality and philosophy, the following essays deal with the difficult search for the remnants of the manuscript of Popper’s first book on epistemology, with the birth of the «Open Society», Popper’s ethics, his path from evolutionary biology to his late evolutionary thinking and the role of Popper’s objective knowledge in a modern knowledge society.