When Karl Popper received the news of the events in Vienna March 1938 in his New Zealand
exile he decided to start working on two books which became classics in political philosophy -
his theory of an open democratic society. The volume deals with the lasting significance of
Popper's thoughts and aspects of the genesis of The Poverty of Historicism and the two volumes
of The Open Society. After an essay on Popper's personality and philosophy the following
essays deal with the difficult search for the remnants of the manuscript of Popper's first book
on epistemology with the birth of the Open Society Popper's ethics his path from
evolutionary biology to his late evolutionary thinking and the role of Popper's objective
knowledge in a modern knowledge society.
