The bleak record will cast additional doubt on the hypothesis that reasoning skill in philosophical matters transfers to political judgment. Perhaps it is not the way philosophers argue that influences their politics but, rather, the opposite. Maybe it is philosophers’ politics that affects their intellectual standards (for the worse) and leads them down the path of irrationality when they enter the political domain.
1 They also cited the UNESCO publication Philosophy: A School of Freedom (2007), but far from advocating compulsory philosophy classes that book actually urges restraint and caution in this matter. It recommends that those who think about introducing philosophy into primary-school curricula should first initiate trial projects “so that the success of these practices can be evaluated in relation to national educational objectives” (17).
2 “In fact many interventions have been shown to raise test scores and mental ability ‘in the short run’ (i.e., while the program itself was in progress), but long-run gains have proved more elusive” (Neisser et al. 1996, 88).
3 As one of the participants of these events reported: “In England there was once a ‘Long Parliament.’ The Constituent Assembly of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] was the shortest parliament in the entire history of the world. It ended its inglorious and joyless life after 12 hours and 40 minutes.” (www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/red-army/1918/raskolnikov/ilyin/ch01.htm#bk04)
4 A good illustration is the following joke that was popular in the Soviet Union precisely in the thirties: There is a ring at the door at 3 o’clock at night. The husband goes to answer. He returns and says: “Don’t worry, dear, it is bandits who have come to rob us.”
Otto Neurath: A Philosopher and the Commissars
“Neurath must be rediscovered!”
—RUDOLF HALLER
Among the historical roots of contemporary analytic philosophy is logical positivism, a movement that started in Central Europe in the period between the two world wars. It is mainly associated with the group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle. Some of the leading positivists (Rudolf Carnap, Carl Gustav Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, and Philipp Frank) immigrated to the United States in the thirties and had a huge and lasting influence on the development of philosophy there and beyond.
Despite a lot of recent research on the development of logical positivism, there are still many misconceptions about it, particularly about its politics. Here is an example of how even one of the cognoscenti, philosopher Clark Glymour, can go astray:
There is a larger reason I do not find the positivists embarrassing: the contrast case on the continent. The positivists . . . wrote with scientific and liberal ambitions, and at least with a passing connection with mathematics and science; in a time in which philosophy on the continent was embracing obscurantism and vicious, totalitarian politics they stood for liberal politics (Glymour 2011).
True, there was a strand of liberal politics among positivists. But it is incorrect to ascribe that attitude to the movement itself. The Vienna Circle did have its (classical) liberal wing, represented mainly by Moritz Schlick. It seems he hated anything that smacked of political agitation, explaining: “We have no need for agitation, we leave that to political parties. In science we simply describe what we have found out and we hope that we got it right” (Neider 1999, 313).
But another, larger group of philosophers, represented by Neurath, Carnap, Hahn1 and others, had more radical political views; some of them leaned toward socialism or even, more worryingly, communism—in theory and sometimes, as we will see, in practice as well. Contrary to what Glymour says, “vicious, totalitarian politics” was by no means absent from the positivists’ thinking.
Let us first illustrate how politics sometimes crept, unexpectedly and rather crudely, into important programmatic documents that were supposed to present the positivist philosophy to the world. This is from the famous manifesto of the Vienna Circle from 1929:
This development [the increased appreciation of empirical science] is connected with that of the modern process of production, which is becoming ever more rigorously mechanized and leaves ever less room for metaphysical ideas. It is also connected with the disappointment of broad masses of people with the attitudes of those who preach traditional metaphysical and theological doctrine. So it is that in many countries the masses now reject these doctrines much more consciously than ever before, and along with their socialist attitudes tend to lean towards a down-to-earth empiricist view (Neurath 1973, 317; emphasis added).
What is the evidence that “broad masses of people” ever had any idea about traditional metaphysics, let alone that they were disappointed with it? Also, how do “their socialist attitudes” become relevant for the manifesto defending the scientific worldview? And, finally, how can the alleged fact that “masses” lean toward empiricism advance the case of logical empiricism? All this is left unexplained.
We know that most of the group members enthusiastically supported the manifesto although the first draft was written by its most radical member, Neurath. Carnap and Hahn also had some input, while other members were indirectly involved: Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Friedrich Waismann, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, and Kurt Gödel, who all officially belonged to the Circle. The manifesto was dedicated to Schlick, but he was not at all happy with the leftist rhetoric of some parts of the document, believing as he did that philosophical insights should be strictly separated from political views and value judgments. Menger had the same concern, and for this reason he decided to distance himself from the Circle, asking Neurath to list him henceforth as “only among those close to the Circle” (from Menger’s “Introduction” in Hahn 1980).
The Ernst Mach Society, an organization that was also associated with logical positivists and that was led by Schlick, was outlawed by the Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss in 1934. When Schlick protested to the police, arguing that the Society was completely apolitical, he was criticized by both Neurath and Carnap, who “did not feel comfortable” having the Society described as “politically neutral” (Stadler 1992, 376). The police searched Neurath’s offices in Vienna in his absence, most likely (as his future wife Marie suspected) because he had been denounced as a Communist (Reisch 2005, 32). See pp. 25–32 for more details.
Another member of the Vienna Circle, mathematician Karl Menger, had this to say about Otto Neurath:
[Neurath] looked at everything—ideas as well as facts—through an often distorting lens of socialist philosophy and with an eye to the possible effects of the ideas and facts on a socialization of society. I have never seen a scholar as consistently obsessed with an idea and an ideal as Neurath (Menger 1994, 60).
Here is how Karl Popper saw Neurath:
In my opinion he was a kind of Marxist, he supported a kind of politics which I regarded as very wrong. Furthermore, he was especially naive, in the best sense of the word. His attitude to communism was naive, decidedly naive (from an interview with Popper in Stadler 2015, 269).
Heinrich Neider, another contemporary of Neurath who knew him personally, confirms this impression:
With him knowledge and thought were always just an aid to the actual doing, which for him ultimately was the revolution. He had a revolutionary past and he actually always saw himself as a revolutionary (Neider 1999, 298).
When Neurath visited New York