POPPER, Karl.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Poverty of Historicism. First edition in book form in English, signed by Popper on the front free endpaper and from the collection of his friend, the philosophical broadcaster Bryan Magee, with his 1957 ownership initials also on the front free endpaper. By the 1970s, Popper and Magee (1930-2019) were both friends and close intellectual allies. Popper had appeared twice on Magee's 1970 radio series Conversations with Philosophers, and in 1973 Magee wrote a laudatory book-length study of Popper's thought: his first such work and one of the earliest such studies of Popper. There, he highlights the "sense of awe at science and the world it reveals" (p. 30) in the Poverty of Historicism. In 1957, Magee had yet to embark on his broadcasting career, but he was evidently following Popper's work closely. The Poverty of Historicism attacks the traditional concept of general laws of historical development: he argues that the course of history is fundamentally unforeseeable. The book first appeared in three articles in Economica from 1944-45.

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