POPPER, Karl.

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The Open Society and Its Enemies. Fifth edition, presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title of Volume I to the public intellectual Bryan Magee, "To Bryan, with love, from Karl".By the 1960s, Bryan Magee (1930-2019) was established as a political and cultural broadcaster. He certainly knew Karl Popper by 1970, when he appeared on Magee's radio series Conversations with Philosophers. In 1973, Magee wrote a book-length study of his friend's philosophy, his first such work and one of the earliest such studies of Popper. There he contended that he could not see how anyone could read the Open Society "and still be a Marxist" (p. 89). His study later prompted discussions of Popper's philosophy with Margaret Thatcher, and he was to rank Popper alongside Russell for philosophical originality.Three pages of manuscript notes in Magee's hand are loosely inserted, on paper from London's Savile Club and Nottingham's Albany Hotel: they index key arguments and principles in the Open Society. Magee has recorded his "Third reading", of April 1971, on the half-title of both volumes, while that of Volume II also bears his initials. The Open Society (1945) was Popper's first book in English, the work which established his reputation in the Anglophone world. It demonstrates how intellectual authoritarianism can lead inexorably to political totalitarianism, and critiques the flaws of large-scale social engineering, be it the philosopher-kingdoms of Plato or the communist societies of Marx.

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