Neurath’s tendency to mix politics with philosophy of science is recognizable in many of his writings. Here is an illustration from his essay “Personal Life and Class Struggle” from 1928:
Scientific attitude and solidarity go together. Whoever joins the proletariat can say with justification that he joins love and reason. . . . Marxism . . . announces to the proletarian front that it has become the carrier of the scientific attitude. The time should not be far off when this will become clear to many serious bourgeois thinkers. . . . To many bourgeois it may seem degrading . . . if one looks at [science] from the point of view of the class struggle. The proletariat appreciates science properly only as a means of struggle and propaganda in the service of socialist humanity. Many who came from the bourgeoisie are worried whether the proletariat will have some feeling for science; but what does history teach us? It is precisely the proletariat that is the bearer of science without metaphysics (Neurath 1973, 252, 297; emphasis added).
The best way, though, to see how radical Neurath’s political views were is to look at his attempts to realize his ideas in practice. Let us briefly consider two such episodes: one in Munich, the other in Moscow.
In the chaos at the end of World War I in November 1918, Kurt Eisner, the head of the Independent Social Democratic Party, declared a free state of Bavaria. Neurath saw this as a window of opportunity for applying his political theories to the real world. He went to Munich, discussed his economic ideas with Eisner and others, and also presented his ideas in a talk to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council.
Here are the main goals, in Neurath’s own words:
In order to be able to control money and credit transactions, it would be mandatory to introduce a moneyless payment system. This would also prevent the hoarding of money and tax evasion.
. . . An economic plan would have to be the basis for all measures taken by the large organizations which are to be created. It would be mandatory to trace the movements of raw materials, energy, people and machines on their way through the economy. Therefore one needs a universal statistic that provides comprehensive overviews for entire countries and even the whole world. All specific statistics have to be incorporated into it.
. . . Wages in kind and barter would again become important tools on this higher level of socio-economic organization.
. . . [T]he central bank would have to organize agriculture, mining and industry simultaneously, supply farms with industrial products and administer agricultural production.
. . . Socialization should not be simply from the bottom up; rather, one has to form the organizations from the top down since this would be the only way to secure that everything receives its appropriate position (quoted in Cartwright et al. 2008, 44–45).
The central bank organizing agriculture, mining, and industry simultaneously? A universal statistic keeping track of movements of raw materials, energy, people, and machines “throughout the whole world”? Workers being paid in kind and then presumably, without money, praying to God (or the bureaucracy in charge) to find a way to exchange their “wages,” on favorable terms, for something they really needed? And bureaucrats (perhaps philosopher kings?) at the top, making sure that “everything receives its appropriate position”?
Some readers will probably react to these proposals in the same way as Max Weber, who placed Neurath politically on the “extreme left” and proclaimed his economic ideas to be an “amateurish, objectively absolutely irresponsible foolishness” (quoted in Neurath 2004, 24). According to the well-known economist Lujo Brentano, Neurath’s economic plans for the future were similar to “the economic organization that may have existed in ancient Egypt, where everyone’s life was directly or indirectly micromanaged by the King” (Sandner 2014, 124). The prominent Marxist Otto Bauer described Neurath as a representative of “a military and authoritarian socialism” (ibid., 134). Even the socialist Karl Kautsky was appalled and said, first, that the ideal for Neurath’s proposals would be “the prison or the barracks, whose inmates get everything they need in natura” (quoted in Nemeth et al. 2008, 66), and second, that the envisaged level of state control would have to include coercion and forceful police action “with results which would be as poor as in Russia today” (ibid., 68).
But when Neurath presented his program amid the turmoil of revolutionary Munich in January 1919, the workers, soldiers, and some politicians liked it. In March, under the newly formed Hoffmann government, he was appointed director of the Central Economic Administration, a body with many important prerogatives. In April even more radical elements took power and declared the Bavarian Soviet Republic.2 The ousted government fled the city, but Neurath stayed and kept his position.
One of the revolutionary activities Neurath was involved in was the socialization of newspapers. The justification for this move was that it was intolerable that “many members of the public are forced to read a newspaper that is politically, spiritually and intellectually alien and disgusting to them” (quoted in Cartwright et al. 2008, 49). In what way were members of the public “forced” to read something that they found “disgusting”? Isn’t it more likely that this was just an excuse for the government to take away freedom of the press? Nancy Cartwright and her coauthors in their study of Neurath try valiantly to exonerate him by arguing that he was actually “opposed to censorship” (ibid., 50) and that “he stressed both then and at other times that there was no intention to limit freedom of expression in any way, but rather the converse” (246). Unfortunately, a documented public statement of his suggests the opposite:
I will make energetic use of the authority given to me by the parliament. . . . The bourgeois newspapers are allowed to provide only a small part of political news. They have no right to express a political opinion. They may offer instructional or entertaining articles to the public. But only free men, i.e. socialists from the majority party up to communists, have the right to freedom of the press (quoted in Noske 1920, 136).
This kind of selective application of the freedom of the press has an eerie resemblance to Herbert Marcuse’s infamous suggestion—in the true spirit of Newspeak—that genuine (or “liberating”) tolerance should extend only to one half of the political spectrum: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left” (Marcuse et al. 1969, 109).
Given that Gustav Noske was Neurath’s enemy at the time (he was in charge of the army that suppressed the Bavarian revolution), perhaps his report of Neurath’s statement should not be immediately taken at face value. Yet it is not very likely that Noske made this up out of whole cloth; if he had, Neurath would have in all likelihood vigorously reacted. But to the best of my knowledge, Neurath never disputed this damaging attribution of which he must have been aware. Besides, other sources also point out that Neurath’s role in this affair was not something to be proud of, e.g., that “the government was under the control of the extremists, and was forced, for example, to undertake under the direction of Dr. Neurath the immediate socialization of the Bavarian newspaper publishing companies” (Lutz 1922, 139; emphasis added).
Although Neurath was offered a six-year contract at the beginning of his term as director of the Central Economic Administration, he managed to stay in office only about one month. The Bavarian Soviet Republic collapsed within weeks, which should not be surprising in light of all known facts. Among many other worrying circumstances, some very strange individuals were appointed to key positions in the government—in some cases the lunatics were running the asylum.
At one point the foreign minister of the short-lived Soviet Republic was Franz Lipp, who on one occasion sent a cable to Lenin, explaining to