Elisabeth Nemeth

Otto Neurath’s Utopias — The Will to Hope

When Neurath wrote these lines in the Social-Democratic monthly Der Kampf in 1920, he already had behind himself a concrete attempt to realise the Utopia of a new economic order: the Munich soviet republic had been destroyed! But not much had changed concerning the importance of the concept Utopia: the view that socialism stood at the door was still common in Austrian Social Democratic circles, and Neurath’s Utopias were after all designs which were to be realised after the proletariat had gained power.

The Philosophy of the “Other Austrian Economics”

I propose to reconstruct Neurath’s early economic theory as a genuinely theoretical, academic contribution to the epistemological controversies which were going on in the not yet well defined field of social science and economics before World War 1, rather than as an early, preparatory stage of his later ideas on socialism (as a planned economy in kind). Emphasizing the difference between his early theory and his later political activism can help us spell out the philosophical impact of Neurath’s highly original theoretical approach to economics and how his conceptual innovations there are related to his later contributions to logical empiricism. Tracing Neurath’s thought back to the debates on the subject matter of economics and social science before World War 1, also helps us to reconstruct the issues of these earlier debates that disappeared during the “short” 20th century.

“Freeing up One's Point of View”: Neurath's Machian Heritage Compared with Schumpeter's

1 Preliminaries Why concern oneself with Otto Neurath’s economic thought in its historical context? Could anything be more out of fashion than a theory proposing a centrally managed planned economy? Than the views of a theorist whose ideas on in-kind economic planning drove the notion of economic planning to its utmost extreme (ad absurdum, as most would say)? Indeed, Neurath’s ideas appeared too radical and utopian even for the social democrats of the 1920s. 1 So why give even a second thought to them today? Would it not be better to follow the advice a colleague gave me in the 1980s and to pass over Neurath’s “youthful sins” silently so as not to tarnish the reputation that – finally, after a lengthy delay – has been accredited to Neurath for his impressive philosophical achievements within the framework of logical empiricism? In the years since the 1980s, however, Neurath’s economic writings have attracted much more interest than anyone would previously have suspected. Today we are aware of the fact that Neurath formulated ideas at an unexpectedly early stage that are currently relevant in ecological economy, social choice theory and developmental economy. And that his reflections vis-a-vis “associational socialism” could provide interesting impulses for a new theory of socialism. 2 Viewed from this perspective, Neurath’s status is secure as a precursor of theoretical developments and debates that are in full swing today. But is that enough? After all, if the role of the precursor is an endearing one, isn’t it also quite thankless? For even in the areas in which Neurath can be regarded as a precursor, the relevant questions are posed today with far greater precision and with reference to current facts – so why should anyone concern oneself with a precursor whose fundamental assumptions differ so greatly from those of the overwhelming majority of economists working today?

Ein kritischer Blick auf Neuraths Bildstatistik. Lucien Febvre über Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft

Zusammenfassung Im Jahr 1931 veroffentlichte der Historiker Lucien Febvre in den Annales eine Rezension von Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: Bildstatistisches Elementarwerk, das im Jahr 1930 von Otto Neurath am Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien herausgegeben worden war. Das Werk kann als ein Hohepunkt der bildstatistischen Arbeiten des Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseums gelten. Febvres kritische Betrachtung dieses Werks thematisiert neuralgische Punkte der bildstatistischen Darstellung soziologischer und geographischer Zusammenhange, wie sie von Otto Neurath und seinem Team entwickelt wurden. Die Rezension Lucien Febvres ist wenig bekannt und auch heute noch lehrreich.

Edgar Zilsel on Historical Laws

Initially it seems surprising that Edgar Zilsel’s work has found as little response among philosophers as it has. After all, his contributions to the Vienna Circle’s debates about probability and protocol statements were published in Erkenntnis. Already his doctoral dissertation dealt with a central problem of modern philosophy of science—the status of statistical laws in physics—and revealed a remarkably knowledgeable mathematician, physicist and philosopher. Yet the way in which Zilsel raised the issues, namely via Leibniz, Spinoza and Kant, was not easy to accept for many of the later logical empiricists. Zilsel stuck with what in his dissertation he had called the “problem of application” and held that it needed to be solved even once the framework of logical empiricism had been accepted. By contrast, Richard von Mises and Otto Neurath considered it a pseudo-problem. Zilsel’s views are difficult to categorise and nowadays even difficult to understand. Just as Mises and Neurath were puzzled by the problem of application, so contemporary readers are likely to be puzzled by Zilsel’s search for “historical laws”. What were they supposed to be and why did Zilsel think it so important to discover them?

The Unity of Planned Economy and the Unity of Science

The concepts ‘unity’, ‘uniformity’, ‘unification’ are all-pervasive in the writings of Otto Neurath and may serve as the leading themes in the discussion of what it was that Neurath wanted to achieve. Their repeated appearances in different contexts make evident the connectedness of his efforts and show up a line of development whose path cannot be reconstructed merely systematically or theoretically, but must be comprehended as the result of a praxis which found its direction in the confrontation of individual will and social exigencies.