Abstract
The article shows how two domains of Neurath’s broad and multifaceted work are related to each other: the concepts and methods he wanted to implement in political economics, on the one hand, and the methods of visualization that he and his interdisciplinary team developed at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna, on the other. Some of Neurath’s suggestions in both domains are surprisingly modern even today.
This article is a revised version of a paper that was first published as “Socially Enlightened Science. Neurath on Social Science and Visual Education,” in Mélika Ouelbani (ed.), Thèmes de Philosophie Analytique, Université de Tunis, Tunis, 2006, pp. 83–112. A revised version was published as “Visualizing relations in society and economics: Otto Neurath’s Isotype-method against the background of his economic thought,” in Jean-Yves Béziau (ed.). La pointure du symbole, Paris: éditions Petra 2014. For this volume the text has been revised and amended. Throughout the paper all translations from German to English are mine, and Neurath’s reprinted papers are quoted form Neurath (1981, 1991, 1998).
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Notes
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See Twyman (1975, 1982, 1985), Kinross (1981, 1984), Mueller (1991), Leonard (2001), Stadler (2011), Hartmann and Bauer (2002), Hartmann (2005), Blau (2006), Kraeutler (2008), Vossoughian (2008), Neurath and Kinross (2009), Burke (2009, 2010a, 2011), Kindel (2011), Hochhäusl (2011), Nikolow (2011), Heinrich et al. (2011), and the chapters of Angélique Groß and Silke Körber in the present volume. I want to draw special attention to two volumes: (1) the edition of a manuscript of the late Neurath which has not been published until 2010: From hieroglyphics to Isotype (see Neurath 2010) and to the excellent introduction by Christopher Burke (2010b). The volume includes the numerous illustrations intended by Neurath to accompany his text, and is completed by an extensive appendix showing examples from the rich variety of graphic material that he collected. (2) Isotype. Design and contexts 1925-1971, eds. Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker . London: Hyphen Press, 2013. The volume comprehends all periods of the development of Isotype. It presents both new material and new insights concerning the beginnings in Vienna, Neurath’s time spent in the USSR (Izostat), developments in the Netherlands and America, the Isotype Institute in Oxford, Marie Neurath-Reidemeister’s collaborations with African countries, and her children’s books. It includes an enormous amount of new pictorial material. The quality of the reproduction of graphics and pictures is so high that looking at them feels almost like looking at the originals.
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In a footnote, Neurath refers his use of the term “pleasure” (as comprehending complex and primitive facts at the same time) to Gustav Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik.
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In a similar line of argument, Neurath also criticized Utilitarianism for (at least implicitly) suggesting a sort of a pleasure calculus (Neurath 1912a/1973) as well as Kautsky’s idea to use “labor time units to calculate the cost and benefit of production and regulate distribution” (see Thomas Uebel’s chapter in the present volume).
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See Buek (1926). On Itelson’s influence on Neurath see further Jordi Cat’s chapter in the present volume.
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See, for instance, his debate with Helene Bauer in “Der Kampf” in 1923.
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In Sen’s (1985, 197f.) terms: “The primary feature of well-being can be seen in terms of how a person can ‘function,’ taking that term in a very broad sense. I shall refer to various doings and beings that come into this assessment as functionings. These could be activities (like eating or reading or seeing), or states of existence or being, e.g., being well nourished, being free from malaria, not being ashamed by the poverty of one’s clothing or shoes (to go back to a question that Adam Smith discussed in his Wealth of Nations). I shall refer to the set of functionings a person actually achieves as the functioning vector […].”
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“In examining the well-being of a person, attention can legitimately be paid to the capability set of the person and not just to the chosen functioning vector. This has the effect of taking note of the positive freedoms in a general sense (the freedom ‘to do this’, or ‘to be that’) that a person has” (Sen 1985, 200).
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Given the fact that Neurath was highly critical of Aristotelian Metaphysics (see for instance his letters to Carnap in the present volume), the Aristotelian features in his conception of the subject matter of economics might seem to be inconsistent. Yet, Neurath referred his approach to economics to the Nicomachean Ethics which is arguably independent of Aristotelian Metaphysics. Aristotle’s Ethics is actually to a large extent empirically informed. Neurath could, in my view, quite easily be sympathetic to the empirical orientation of much of Aristotle’s work and at the same time reject his Metaphysics.
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See Thomas Uebel’s highly interesting reconstruction of Neurath’s arguments concerning the possibility / unavoidability of in-kind-considerations in economics and politics (be it socialist or non-socialist) in the present volume.
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The economist Mooslechner emphasized an interesting example: Neurath who is till this day notorious among economists for his plead for a moneyless socialist economy, suggested in 1909 to investigate various monetary systems regarding their productivity: “[H]e did not rule out at that time that differences in the type of monetary organization will lead to corresponding differences in real productivity. ‘The questions of productivity of monetary organization […] are thus granted full legitimacy […]’ (Neurath 1909b/2004, 296)” (Mooslechner 2007, 105).
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Marie Neurath, born Reidemeister, played a crucial role in the whole process. She was the most important “transformer” of statistical data into pictorial graphics. (On the concept of the “transformer” see Neurath and Kinross 2009; see also her memories in Neurath and Cohen 1973, 56–64). She was also the author of numerous highly original books in picture language for younger readers (see, for instance, Kindel 2011). After Neurath’s death she continued to develop the method further. It is due to her that the Isotype material came to the University of Reading (see Twyman 1982) where highly significant research on Isotype is going on. See: http://www.isotyperevisited.org/1981/01/isotype-and-the-university-of-reading.html
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Edward R. Tufte (1983, 61) stresses a very similar point: “The confounding of design variation with data variation over the surface of a graphic leads to ambiguity and deception, for the eye may mix up changes in the design with changes in data.” The examples of bad graphics Tufte (1983, 69) gives are amazingly similar to those Neurath (1936, 75; 1991, 381) had in mind. It is a pity that Tufte does not seem to be aware of Neurath’s work. I did not find any reference to Neurath in Tufte’s writings. In any case, his conceptual framework seems strikingly similar. Remarkably enough, the subject of one of Tufte’s early books is the political control of the economy. Here he described the “interplay between politics and macroeconomics in the United States and other capitalist democracies” and tried to “find specific links between political and economic life” (Tufte 1978, p. IX). At the end of his book he stressed that “those who write about national economics” bear a special responsibility. “That responsibility is to improve the level of public understanding so that voters can evaluate and repudiate corrupt economic policies” (1978, 154). Obviously, there is a link to graphic representation of quantitative data (and the “lie factor” – see Tufte (1983, 57) – that may be found there). In Neurath’s early writings on national economics there is a strong emphasis on the impact public understanding of economic and social issues has on the advancement of democracy. See for instance Neurath (1908/1998, 1910a/1998), and Neurath and Schapire-Neurath (1910).
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This “discursive” procedure by Isotype forms the basis of what C. Burke (2011, 51) called “an early move away from ‘mechanical objectivity’ towards ‘trained judgment’ in scientific visualization.” The “discursive” method is also a core element of what Neurath called “the scientific attitude” (see Nemeth 2011 and the quote at the end of this article).
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It is not the only case in which Neurath’s all too catchy formulations were rather misleading. The same can be said of the terms “physicalism,” “physicalist language,” “unified science,” “unified language,” “index verborum prohibitorum.”
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See also Angélique Groß on the “activation of the addressee” in her contribution to the present volume.
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Silke Körber shows in her chapter in the present volume how Neurath developed during his years in exile the “discursive” dimension of his visualization method further. She calls it “picture-text-style.”
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On the great importance of Gerd Arntz see Stadler (1982).
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Nemeth, E. (2019). Visualizing Relations in Society and Economics: Otto Neurath’s Isotype-Method Against the Background of his Economic Thought. In: Cat, J., Tuboly, A. (eds) Neurath Reconsidered. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 336. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02128-3_6
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