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Karl Popper
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I broached acquaintance with Karl Popper through his famous
book The Poverty of Historicism. Even if his
platitudinous style sometimes irritated me I nevertheless
found the book to be a most interesting and thought provoking work.
Above all it provided a theoretical foundation for the aversion
I felt towards all ideas prescribing revolutionary societal
change according to some "Great Plan" in which human beings are allowed to be
reduced to parts of a machine.
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Even if such conceptions are mostly associated with the real world manifestations of
socialism, which after 1989 hardly can be described as
a serious threat, I none the less found similar thoughts
with the more extreme thinkers of the environmental movement.
Here I think of William Ophuls but also among others Edward Goldsmith's
famous Blueprint for survival.
When I read Popper one problem became more and more clear. Even if he
convincingly showed that all political implementation ought to be
pragmatic and piecemeal his line of argument, fully thought through,
means that politics stands a serious risk of becoming nothing but
administration. Which is exactly what I believe is happening in the
late modern society as the political questions become increasingly
complicated and technocratic in nature.
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