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Austrian-British philosopher of science and politics, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies is a head-on attack on historicism – the idea that history develops towards an end point according to fixed laws – in the thinking of philosophers Plato, Hegel and Marx. According to Popper, what he sees as their belief in a static society – the future of which can be predicted, which must be guided by a central political system, and in which the state is more important than the individual – makes them the defenders of the closed society and the spiritual fathers of communism, fascism and other ‘isms’ with an absolute truth claim. Although the text only appeared in book form in 1957, The Poverty of Historicism is actually Karl Popper's original attack on historicism. The three-volume essay with the same title already appeared in 1944 and 1945, in the international journal Economica. Popper criticises the 'historicist doctrine' of the social sciences, which states that we can only understand a social group by knowing the internal principles that determine the development of the group. He links this to holism, the belief that the individual is mainly determined by the group to which she/he belongs. Popper contrasts this with an individualism that considers social groups as the sum of their members, and social developments as a result of actions by individuals, usually unplanned and therefore also unpredictable.

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