 Given Popper’s personal history and background, it is hardly surprising that he developed a deep and abiding interest in social and political philosophy. He understood holism as the view that human social groupings are greater than the sum of their members, that they act on their human members and shape their destinies and that they are subject to their own independent laws of development. Historicism he identified as the belief that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to certain principles or rules towards a determinate end (as for example in the Marx’s dialectical materialism). The link between them is that holism holds that individuals are essentially formed by the social groupings to which they belong, while historicism suggests that we can understand such a social grouping only in terms of the internal principles which determine its development.