The Individual and the Value of Human Life

The Individual and the Value of Human Life brings to the English-speaking world the ideas of Joseph Popper-Lynkeus, an Austrian philosopher, scientist, and social reformer who enjoyed great fame at the beginning of the 20th century and whose admirers included Einstein, Freud, Ernest Mach, and Karl Raymond Popper. Originally published in Germany in 1910, the book contains the ethical underpinnings of a social philosophy in which the individual is put forward as having inestimable value. Against theorists such as Hegel and Spencer whose writings bristle with contempt for the common man, Popper-Lynkeus puts forward an individualistic ethic that is at once a proposal for a welfare state, a critique of involuntary conscription, a recommendation for penal reform, and a criticism of metaphysics and religion. Haber’s introduction includes a biographical essay and discussion and analysis of the book’s central ideas.