English Heritage Blue Plaque for Philosopher Karl Popper

The philosopher Karl Popper (1902 - 1994) will be commemorated with an English Heritage Blue Plaque at 16 Burlington Rise, EN4, London Borough of Barnet, at 3.30pm on Thursday 28 February 2008.  The Blue Plaque will be unveiled by the proposer of the plaque, Bryan Magee.  Popper lived at this address at a time when his reputation was in the ascent – between 1946 and 1950 he lectured to great acclaim and was appointed a Professor at the London School of Economics.

Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna in 1902 to a family of Jewish descent.  Popper was deeply affected by the political and economic turmoil that struck his home city in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and for a short spell, the youthful Popper embraced Marxism, an ideology he later came to abhor.  He took time to find his metier, first undertaking an apprenticeship in cabinet making before studying at the Vienna Conservatory with a view to pursuing musical endeavours.   Popper then went on to qualify as a school teacher, but was working as a social worker when he entered the Pedagogical Institute in 1925.  It was here he met his wife to be – Josefine Henninger, known as Hennie (1906 – 1985); the couple married in 1930.  At the Institute he studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and psychology and in 1928, was awarded a PhD.  His first published book was Logik der Forschung (1934; translated into English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery), which made his name as a philosopher of science, and put the reputation of theories at the heart of scientific method.  His subsequent political and social philosophy made significant reference to this piece of work.

In 1935, Popper was invited to lecture in England – on first airing, his ideas provoked considerable bemusement, but importantly, he made numerous important contacts, including Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Isaiah Berlin. Having foreseen the Nazi takeover of Austria, he took up a senior lectureship in philosophy at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, New Zealand in 1937.  Here, he completed his best-known work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a vehement attack on the totalitarian strands in the thought of Plato and Marx.

In 1946, Popper returned to England to take up an appointment at the London School of Economics where he became Professor of Logic and Scientific Method in 1949, in which year he became a British citizen. Popper’s reputation grew; he addressed large audiences, and wrote prolifically. His works included The Poverty of Historicism (1957) – another attack on Marxism – On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance (1961) and Conjectures and Refutations: the growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963). Popper was knighted in 1965 and made a Companion of Honour in 1982. He retired from the LSE in 1969, although he remained an active scholar until the last. He died in 1994 in the Mayday Hospital in Thornton Heath.

Although Popper professed no real affection for London, the short period during which Popper and his wife lived at Burlington Rise was a crucial one in terms of the development of his academic reputation; he was considered, according to one biographer, ‘a rising star’, with a hugely popular lecture series.  During this time Popper accepted an invitation to give the William James lectures at Harvard; his lecture on quantum theory was attended by Einstein. It was also while living in Barnet, in October 1946 that Popper clashed memorably with Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge. Wittgenstein, ominously fingering a poker taken from the fireplace, demanded an example of a moral rule, to which Popper replied ‘Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers’.

The proposer of the plaque, Bryan Magee, said:  “Karl Popper, one of the true giants in philosophy of our time, chose to spend most of his life in this country. The plaque expresses our appreciation of his presence among us, which contributed so much.”

Popper lived long enough to be gratified by the fall of communism and depressed by subsequent events in the former Yugoslavia. Since his death, the publication of numerous readers and a detailed biography of his early life have borne ample testament to the enduring qualities of his work. His defence of liberal values against totalitarianism of all shades has been cited approvingly by politicians from both the left and right, including Anthony Crosland, Sir Keith Joseph, Vaclav Havel and Helmut Kohl.