The Failed Philosopher

Soros wanted to be admitted to a company of thinkers, was refused three times, and built the substitute out of money.

A course on the thought of George Soros.

Philosophy · Finance

What you will learn

State what he was doing in the summer before the LSE, and what he read.
Explain what he later said the experience of that year did to him.
Describe what Soros said he admired about Keynes's career.
Identify how the Apostles actually selected members.
Compare the Apostles' admission rule with the City's, as it was explained to him.
State what Soros's formal standing was when he approached Popper.
Explain what the second essay did that the first was not asked to do.
Identify the doctrine Popper proposes that Soros will later say he departed from.

Bottom — He arrives in England at seventeen with no money, no friends and no prospects, and spends a summer as a swimming-pool attendant reading everything he can borrow. Fifty years later he names that year…
The Society He Read About — At the LSE he was unimpressed by everyone around him and fell in love, through a biography, with a Cambridge club that had been designed to keep people like him out.
The Letter — Aged twenty-one and registered in economics, he wrote to Karl Popper and asked to be taken on. He was set a paper, invited to the house, told to revise — and wrote a different essay instead, which…
The Wrong Direction — Handbags, then knickknacks, then Blackpool. The years he sank. And in the middle of them, a broken leg and a charity that humiliated him — out of which came the operating rule of everything he later…
America, and the Theory in the Body — He reaches New York by a series of accidents and becomes an arbitrage trader. Then in 1962 a position goes against him, and he discovers, through his own symptoms, that he is not standing outside the…
The Burden of Consciousness — A tax on foreign securities turns his job into a sinecure and he spends three years on the book. He gets Popper to agree to read it, then goes back and takes it off the desk. In 1966 he reads his own…

The Open Society and Its Enemies — Popper's 1945 attack on the intellectual sources of totalitarianism — the book Soros read as an undergraduate and wrote to him about.
The Poverty of Historicism — Popper's argument against the claim that history has laws which permit prediction; the source of the unity-of-method doctrine.
Conjectures and Refutations — Popper's 1963 collection, whose preface states his whole theory of knowledge in one sentence.
The Life of John Maynard Keynes — Roy Harrod's 1951 biography — the book in which Soros read about Keynes, Bloomsbury and the Apostles, and decided what he wanted.

This course was built from 7 books.

the Apostles, open and closed societies, the unity of method, The Burden of Consciousness, intelligent nepotism, arbitrage

Part of the Simposeum course library.