On Mon, 28 Dec 1998 21:20:25 -0500 (EST) Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes:
>Didn't Karl Korsch become interested in logical positivism, even plan
>a
>book on its relation to Marx's theory? Is there an unpublished mss or
>some
>account of what he would have written had he not be striken by
>illness?
>I'll look at the Patrick Goode biography when I get home and Nancy
>Cartwright's new bio of Neurath.
>best, rb
>
>
I skimmed the Nancy Cartwright book on Neurath a while back. It gives a pretty comprehensive treatment of his life and thought and also details his political life as a militant socialist. Neurath devoted most of his life to the workers movement. As such he was a participant in the abortive German revolution of 1919 where he served as minister of economic planning for the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria. After the revolution he put on trial by the Weimar government for treason. The intercession of friends like his teacher, Max Weber and of the Austrian government eventually to a dismissal of the charges. Returning to Austria he became active in the Austrian Social Democrats and he was fixture of the intellectual ferment in "red" Vienna. He was an early member of the Vienna Circle which was founded by Moritz Schlick and quickly became a leading figure in it. He co-authored the Circle's manifesto, "The Scientific Conception of the World" with Rudolf Carnap and in that document he specifically linked logical positivism to socialism and even Marxism.
The Cartwright book also describes his rather stormy relationship with Schlick. Schlick, a scion of the Austrian aristocracy was a political conservative and was personally a rather fastidious man. Neurath was a Jewish intellectual, a leftist, who liked to project a proletarian manner and was famous for his untidiness. Not too surprisingly they did not get along too well.
Rakesh might want to dig up Neurath's writings on economic planning most of which I understand have yet to be translated into English. He was an early participant in the socialist calculation debate, with Neurath defending the feasibility of rational economic planning against the objections of Weber, Hayek, and von Mises.
As a longtime activist in the workers movement he was particularly interested in worker education and this interest inspired him to develop his "Vienna method" of visual education involving an international language of simplified pictures ("isotypes"). In recent years there has been renewed interest in this aspect of Neurath's work since it is seen as having anticipated the use of icons in travel centers and on computer screens amongst other things.
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