Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years presents a coherent survey of the reception and influence of Karl Popper's masterpiece The Open Society and its Enemies over the fifty years since its publication in 1945, as well as applying some of its principles to the context of modern Eastern Europe.
This unique volume contains papers by many of Popper's contemporaries and friends, including such luminaries as Ernst Gombrich, in his paper 'The Open Society and its Enemies: Remembering its Publication Fifty Years Ago'.

This set of essays is concerned with the explanation of large scale social change. Concentration is on the social stagnation characteristic of agrarian circumstances, the conditions for exit from that world, and the varied social orders that inhabit, sometimes precariously, the modern world community. The distinguished contributors from archaeology, anthropology, sociology, economic history and philosophy, have all been stimulated by the work of Ernest Gellner, and the essays are in dialogue with his view of our social condition.

I. C. Jarvie was trained as a social anthropologist in the center of British social anthropology - the London School of Economics, where Bronislaw Malinowski was the object of ancestor worship. Jarvie's doctorate was in philosophy, however, under the guidance of Karl Popper and John Watkins. He changed his department not as a defector but as a rebel, attempting to exorcize the ancestral spirit. He criticized the method of participant obser vation not as useless but as not comprehensive: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the making of certain contributions to anthropology; rather, it...

A collection of essays concerned with some key problems in the study of philosophy, politics and society.