Josef Popper-Lynkeus

Origins and early life

Josef Popper was born on 21 February 1838 in Kolín in Bohemia, in a poor Jewish family of the ghetto, and remained a Jew all his life, never converting and in his last years counting himself among the Zionists of Vienna.

Work and career

As a Jew he was barred from the university teaching post his talent deserved, and he earned his living as an engineer and inventor, holding patents on boiler scale prevention and devising, in 1862, a scheme for the electrical transmission of power that was a generation ahead of its time. His nephew was the philosopher Karl Popper, who has his own fiche on this site. Under the pen-name Lynkeus, the lynx-eyed lookout of the Argonauts, he published in 1899 Phantasien eines Realisten, a book of stories that the Austrian censors briefly banned and that contains the tale 'Dreaming like Waking', in which Sigmund Freud later recognized, with generous public acknowledgment, an anticipation of his own theory of dream distortion.

His central work, Die allgemeine Nährpflicht (1912), proposed that every citizen owe the state a few years of service in a 'subsistence army' in exchange for a guaranteed lifelong minimum of food, housing, clothing and medical care for all, a scheme that made him a forerunner of the guaranteed-income idea and that a Vienna society was founded to promote. He was a radical humanist who wrote against the death penalty, against militarism and against the sacrifice of the individual to the state, and defended Voltaire's reputation in a book of 1905.

Later years

Albert Einstein, who visited him in Vienna, called him a prophetic and saintly figure and wrote the preface to the posthumous edition of his writings. He died in Vienna on 22 December 1921, an honorary citizen of the city.