Elias and Popper

Abstract

Norbert Elias hated Karl Popper. He hated him with an intensity that in most people would indicate some personal animosity arising from some unpleasant face-to-face encounter. Yet, although they may indeed have met each other, possibly at the London School of Economics in the late 1940s after Popper returned from his wartime refuge in New Zealand, I wonder whether Popper was even aware of Elias. Elias never mentioned having met Popper, and there is no correspondence between them in the Elias archive at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar. No, so far as I can tell, Elias’s intense dislike was purely on intellectual grounds.