Katrina Forrester writes:

In After ‘The Open Society’, Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner have collected a range of Popper’s published and unpublished essays, letters and lectures. To the picture Popper presented of himself in his autobiography Unended Quest (1976), this volume adds a map of his intellectual development during his later years. He was sympathetic to Marxism at the beginning of his political life, but ended up a reactionary neoliberal. He was not alone: as he slid to the right, so did the liberal consensus. The essays here tell both stories. Popper begins the volume as the kind of liberal who cares about equality and ‘the social question’. By the end, he is a free marketeer, angry with the spoilt, irresponsible younger generation, with their complaints about capitalism, their drugs and their alcohol – by all accounts, a grumpy old man. This is a far cry from Marxism, but a far cry too from the man who in The Open Society aimed at uniting the dispersed left – liberals and socialists – under the banner of ‘humanitarianism’.

(LRB 26 April 2012)

Routledge | Paperback 528 pp. |ISBN: 9780415610230