Otto Neurath: Economics and Socialism

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, philosophy of science developed in “Red Vienna” in two main communities with international recognition: the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism and the L. Mises Seminar on the Methodology of Social Sciences. Otto Neurath is known as one of the organizers of the Vienna Circle, as a partici­pant in its key discussions. But he also received professional training in econom­ics, and believed in its special role in society. Although Neurath was a pluralist about knowledge systems, he trusted firmly in the power of science. Not science on its own as an abstract system of thought, but science in the hands of the social engineer, who can “orchestrate” the different systems of knowledge to build new social orders. The article shows how closely two areas of Neurath’s extensive work are linked: the concepts and methods he wanted to implement in political economy, on the one hand, and the visualization methods he and his team deve­loped at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna, on the other. In his works, Neurath put forward a project of a socialist “natural economy” in which not monetary but “natural calculations” dominate. This project caused a “dispute about socialism” and was criticized from various sides by M. Weber and liberal supporters of the market economy L. Mises and F. Hayek.