RC Series Bundle: The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics) [Paperback]

Karl Popper (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415065690 | ISBN-13: 978-0415065696 | Publication Date: January 30, 1988

A reissue of a classic text.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...it is good to have this brilliant book at last available in English." -- The [London] Times

"Popper's work is of far greater than mere academic value; it has an immediate and manifest bearing on the political decisions that everyone has to make." -- The Listener

"Probably the only book published this year which will outlive this century." -- Arthur Koestler

"This is one of the three or four most important books of the methodology of the social sciences to appear since the war." -- New Statesman

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (January 30, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415065690
• ISBN-13: 978-0415065696
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,001,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gives inspiring ideas and insights into the history., February 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: RC Series Bundle: The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics) (Paperback)

This book is not your easy bedtime reading -- it's serious and requires a reader's thought to travel along the author's walks and remember his points. But the rewards are big -- Popper comes close to defining the method of the field I would call "societal engineering".

Popper's main points to me are:

1. You can't plan and carry out a reform of the whole society. Reason - the people who carry out reforms are themselves changed by reforms. They loose relative objectivity and can no longer see clearly the original plan of reform and follow it.

2. You can plan and carry out changes in a relatively small sector or in a narrow field. Reason - it's possible to receive objective feedback and act on it to steer the reform into the objectives of the original plan.

Examples from Soviet history that startled me:

1. A failure of Lenin and Bolsheviks to change society. They created a plan and did they try -- but the resulting system (in which I was born) instead of changing according to plan, just fed them the data their plans required. Even more almost all the originators of changes were destroyed by these changes.

2. A relative success of the NEP (New Economic Politics) initiated by Lenin and his associates. It dealt with relatively narrow field - small to middle businesses and it had definite goal -- to feed hungry country of the post-World War I Soviet Russia. And it did succeed! The NEP was stopped by Stalin, who unsuccessfully continued to implement plans to change whole society.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a demolishing critic to the Ideological Marxism, August 16, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: RC Series Bundle: The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics) (Paperback)

Karl Popper is one of the best thinkers about philosophy and Political theory. Two of his greatest merits are, in order: The first is his coherent life (congruence between thougths and acts) and the other is that when this book came up first (it took about 18 years to be translated from German to English), the historycal timing (1950's) was the worst: Everybody thought that the Marxist theory regarding the history was right and scientifically proven. Sir Popper demonstrated all errors of the Marxism from the ideolodical point of view, and that's why the name of the book. Also, Mr. Popper was the only deep critiziser of Karl Marx.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A slim volume with a powerful punch, June 23, 2000

By 

Mark J. Ross - See all my reviews

This review is from: RC Series Bundle: The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics) (Paperback)

I read this book, and several of Karl Popper's other books then available in English, while still a graduate student in anthropology at an American university. While neither my dissertation committee members nor even my fellow graduate students were much interested in my attempts to bring Popper's arguments to their attention, I found his work to be exhilarating for its clarity, courage, and fairmindedness. Thirty-plus years later, I still do.