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ОглавлениеOtto 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 in 1936, Ernest Nagel introduced him to many philosophers sympathetic to logical positivism. Knowing that Neurath “was always on the lookout for talent both intellectually and politically compatible with the Unity of Science movement” (Reisch 2005, 66; emphasis added), Nagel sent him a list of American philosophers who had attended a reception in Neurath’s honor and brief information about each philosopher’s political views. Nagel concluded that they “without exception have left sympathies in politics.”
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 him that Bavaria’s former prime minister had fled from Munich to Bamberg and had taken the key to the ministry toilet with him. (Lenin actually did respond but didn’t offer any advice about how to recover the missing toilet key.) On another occasion Lipp sent the following letter to his colleague, the transport minister: “My dear office mate! I have declared war on Württemberg and Switzerland because these dogs did not lend me 60 locomotives at once. I am certain that we will win. Besides I will beg of the Pope, with whom I am well acquainted, for this victory” (quoted in Noske 1920, 136).
The fact that Neurath could be busily pursuing his plans for far-reaching political reforms amid this level of insanity tells us something about his own irrationality and foolishness. The Munich revolutionaries were a laughingstock around Germany at the time, and for us today certain events bring to mind Monty Python skits—with the difference that the Bavarian Soviet Republic had deadly consequences. Many people lost their lives in these events, on both sides.
While some of the revolutionary leaders were imprisoned for years or executed, Neurath got off with a relatively short sentence of eighteen months and a more lenient incarceration (at a so-called “fortress”). He served only a small part of his sentence.
Neurath was lucky to be treated so kindly. Defending himself in court, he had argued, ridiculously, that he was not involved in politics at all.3 The court rejected this outright and in its verdict insisted that “with his high intelligence he must have been aware that through remaining in his high government office, instead of stepping down, he was in fact aiding and abetting this treasonable government” (Nemeth & Stadler 1996, 20–21). So the court linked Neurath’s guilt to his being smart: He should not have allowed his reason to go on holiday. He himself admitted his responsibility in a lecture he gave in Vienna in 1920: “Though I had not intended support of the Soviet Republic I should have known that my behavior did in fact give such support” (Neurath 1973, 27). Yet some philosophers claim there was little reason to identify Neurath with the Bavarian Soviet government itself (e.g., Rudolf Haller in Uebel 1991, 26).
In Vienna in the 1920s, Neurath and the artist Gerd Arntz developed a method of visual presentation of statistics, which was later to be called ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education). The main idea was to use pictures to simplify information and to present facts in a way that practically anyone could understand.
In September 1929 and February 1930, Neurath contacted VOKS, explaining the advantages of his pictorial statistics for the Soviet Union.4 In an internal memo, VOKS concluded that Neurath’s graphs would certainly be of great use for their propaganda abroad, but for the time being his asking price remained a sticking point (Köstenberger 2013, 276–77). Eventually the Soviet government accepted Neurath’s overtures and invited him to establish and run an institute in Moscow that would apply his method to spread mass information in the service of the regime. The Institute of Pictorial Statistics (IZOSTAT) was born. Neurath was contractually obliged to spend two months a year at the institute in Moscow, which he did from 1931 till the end of 1934.5
As was usual in the Soviet Union, in addition to an administrative director IZOSTAT also had a so-called red director, basically a person appointed by the Communist Party to oversee the work and to be vigilant for the smallest signs of “counter-revolutionary activity.” In addition, the responsibility for IZOSTAT was very early assigned to the Central Executive Committee, the highest governing body of the Soviet Union at the time. In charge of “methodological direction” was a special commission headed by Avel Enukidze, the secretary of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and one of Stalin’s most trusted friends. Neurath was completely okay with all these arrangements, which left no doubt that he and members of his team would be kept on a tight leash by the Communist Party.
In a way, Neurath was the right person for the job because, like his employers, he believed statistics to be an instrument of class struggle. In an article from 1927, “Statistics and Proletariat,” he wrote: “Statistics is a tool of proletarian battle, statistics is a necessary element of the socialist system, statistics is a delight for the international proletariat struggling with the ruling classes” (quoted in Mayr & Schreder 2014, 137).
It appears the leaders of the Communist Party had put great faith in IZOSTAT. In Neurath’s own words: “Our method met with exceptional success in the Soviet Union. In 1931 the Council of People’s Commissars decreed that ‘all public and co-operative organizations, unions and schools are directed to use picture statistics according to the method of Dr. Neurath’” (quoted in Cartwright et al. 2008, 71).
And indeed, the graphs produced under Neurath’s directions soon appeared everywhere: in railway stations and theater foyers, on postcards, and in magazines. And, most importantly, they appeared on a daily basis in newspapers like Izvestia and Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Stadler 1982, 217).
What was it the People’s Commissars especially liked about “pictorial statistics”? Perhaps the illustration in Figure 2.1 (from Arntz et al. 1979) can help explain this.
As Chris Chizlett (1992, 303) pointed out about this and many other graphs produced by IZOSTAT, it is noteworthy that no source is given for the information presented. In fact, according to the testimony of Gerd Arntz, Neurath’s main collaborator at the time, the statistical data were simply provided to IZOSTAT by the Soviet authorities and it was impossible to check their veracity (Sandner 2014, 231).
The particular graph reproduced in Figure 2.1 is supposed to represent the increase in crop spraying in the Soviet Union from 1931 to 1934.6 The pictorial representation is indeed extremely simple and appears to leave no doubt about what it says, namely that there was considerable and impressive progress in crop spraying over this three-year period. The size of the sprayed acreage in the whole country first more than tripled and then increased another 40 percent. Splendid!
FIGURE 2.1: Praising successes of Soviet agriculture during the Holodomor
But a closer examination leads to a very different conclusion. First, notice that the year 1932 is skipped in the graph. Why? And second, the output for the year 1934 is not about what really happened but only about what was planned.7 So although the picture manages to create a belief in steady and remarkable improvement, this is basically sleight of hand.
But the graph is a lie in a much more troubling way. The years that it covers include the infamous period of the great famine in the USSR. It took an especially big toll on Ukraine, where it is often referred to as “Holodomor” (murder by hunger). Scholars agree that the number of people who perished in the famine across the whole Soviet Union was at least 6 million (Courtois et al. 1999, 159; Naimark 2010, 70).
Hence it turns out that Neurath worked for the Soviet government and prepared graphs showing the wonderful successes of crop spraying at the very time when millions of people were starving, as a direct result of the actions of that very government.
This seems so bizarre and inhumane that the question must be raised whether he was possibly unaware about what was going on around him (in the country, let us recall, in which he lived two months a year). Ignorance as an excuse appears to be suggested by what Marie Reidemeister, Neurath’s future wife, allegedly said to him some time after they had left the Soviet Union for good: “Tell me, how can you explain that they made such fools of us in Moscow? For we had not noticed anything of all those scandalous states of affairs” (quoted in Neider 1999, 330).
It is very hard, however, to square the ignorance hypothesis with what was generally known at the time, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. There were many correspondents reporting about the situation in the USSR, in very dramatic terms. For example, in 1933 Malcolm Muggeridge described what he saw with his own eyes and concluded: “The particular horror of their [Bolshevik] rule is what they have done in the villages. This, I am convinced, is one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible the people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened. . . . It is impossible to describe the horror of it” (Muggeridge 2010, 37–38). Pierre Berland, a journalist for Le Temps, one of the leading daily newspapers in France, wrote on May 31, 1932: “The catastrophe, the coming of which was obvious even to the blindest [emphasis added], and which we predicted a year ago, has gripped the country. . . . The food situation is surrounded by a kind of conspiracy of silence, but the catastrophic situation, nevertheless, is the secret of Polichinelle [an open secret].” William Henry Chamberlin, a Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor during the famine, wrote: “To anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and who kept his eyes and ears open the historicity of the famine is simply not open to question” (Chamberlin 1935, 432; emphasis added).
Furthermore, given that Neurath divided his time between Moscow and Vienna (his primary place of residence), there is simply no way he could have missed the persistent public campaign of Theodor Innitzer, the archbishop of Vienna, for assistance to the starving population in the Soviet Union. As we learn from Menger (1994, 195), Innitzer was greatly admired by many members of the Vienna Circle, who met him when he was professor of theology at the University of Vienna (Menger 1982, 98). Innitzer’s appeal for help received so much publicity that it reached the pages of the New York Times, which devoted an article on August 23, 1933, to his warning that millions of lives would be lost without foreign aid and that the situation was so desperate, cases of cannibalism had even been reported.
These facts all point to the conclusion that if Neurath was indeed unaware of the monstrosity of the regime he was serving, this must have been a case of willful blindness.8
In fact, Neurath and his IZOSTAT institute occasionally went beyond the call of duty and engaged in unabashed propaganda, as when they inserted in one of their graphs (see Figure 2.2, from IZOSTAT 1933, 51) a quotation from Stalin: “The period of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the building of socialism in the USSR is a period of flowering of national cultures, socialist in content and national in form.”
The terrible irony is that this graph celebrating the treatment of ethnic minorities by the Soviet regime was made at the time of the Holodomor, which is regarded by mainstream historians as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Another book that illustrates the ideological uses of Neurath’s institute is Pictorial Statistics and the Vienna Method which was published in Russian and was edited by one of Neurath’s closest Russian collaborators. The role of Neurath’s method is explained there in the following way:
FIGURE 2.2: The concern for minorities in the USSR
Izostatistics should become a powerful weapon of mass agitation and propaganda in the hands of the party and the working class in the period of building socialism. . . . the socialist statistics (yes, the socialist statistics, and not statistics in general) helps the party and the administration. . . . the usefulness of Neurath’s method for the purposes of our socialist class statistics (because statistics like any other science cannot be non-class) . . . the IZOSTAT diagrams acquire a special, extremely important agitation-propagandistic meaning (Ivanitsky 1932, 2, 4, 5, 33, 45).
It is hard to believe that the Austrian members of the IZOSTAT (particularly Neurath and Arntz) were unaware of what was said in such an important book that presented their work in the Soviet Union. And yet they gladly continued churning out new graphs and were apparently not bothered at all that IZOSTAT was explicitly and repeatedly described as producing propaganda for the Party.
A book coauthored by the distinguished philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright gives a curiously incoherent account of Neurath’s Moscow episode (72–73). Here are its four key points, each followed by my comment:
(1) “Neurath’s position in Moscow does not indicate full agreement with the political system he worked for.”
All right, but the fact that Neurath didn’t “fully” agree with Stalin certainly does not exonerate him from working for the Soviet government in the face of widely available information about its totalitarian nature and the massive crimes it perpetrated. Saying that Neurath did not support the Bolsheviks 100 percent sounds like a lame and desperate attempt to make him less culpable for his complicity.9 Besides, although Neurath’s support for Stalin’s regime may have fallen short of 100 percent, it nevertheless remained quite high. For it was during his stay in Moscow that, despite some specific criticisms, he still described the overall success of Soviet policy as “colossal” (Sandner 2014, 232).
(2) “At first it may seem that Neurath simply suspended judgment on the internal politics of the Soviet Union.”
Why would this seem “at first”? Why would anyone think Neurath would sign a long-term contract to work for the regime while suspending judgment about its nature? Isn’t it much more logical to presume that he committed himself to work for Stalin only after he formed a not-too-unfavorable opinion about his politics?
(3) “But early on Neurath also evidenced enthusiasm for the Moscow job.”
Indeed. He was initially “deeply impressed” with Soviet economic development. He wrote to Carnap that “it is a relief to be active [in Moscow]” and “not to be part of the decay.” Contrast Neurath’s Moscow excitement with his statement a year earlier that “the atmosphere in Vienna smells of putrefaction.”
(4) “It seems fair to conclude that once the nature of Stalin’s reign became clear Neurath suspended his previous suspension of judgment about Soviet Communism.”
This is a surprising leap. Recall that the hypothesis that when Neurath started to work for the Bolsheviks he suspended judgment about the Soviet Union was at the beginning introduced merely as something that “may seem to be true at first.” But then, after strong evidence to the contrary is presented, the hypothesized initial suspension of judgment is suddenly taken as an established fact.
It very much seems as if Cartwright and her coauthors are here trying to get Neurath off the hook, at least partially, for his collaboration with Stalin’s government. But their attempt does not succeed.
It is ironic that a man who, like his fellow logical empiricists, always insisted on the supreme importance of empirical evidence was nevertheless unable to perceive, or properly take into account, some simple facts that were there in broad daylight for all to see. Also, it is grotesque that someone who thought the true task of a philosopher is to build a better and more humane world ended up providing mendacious propaganda in the service of one of the most evil and oppressive political systems in modern history.
And yet the Vienna Circle is still highly and unreservedly praised for its political stance even by scholars who surely must be acquainted with these embarrassing facts. An expert on the early history of analytic philosophy writes: “With regard to their politics, however, the logical positivists were always on the side of the angels, in that they rejected both Nazism and Stalinism” (Glock 2001, 211).
On the side of the angels? Rejected Stalinism? Always? One of the leading logical positivists, and the author of their manifesto, signed a formal contract to work for Stalin’s agitprop operation! And for more than two years he discharged his obligations with due diligence. Moreover, I could find no record of any fellow logical positivist ever saying a single critical word about Neurath’s happy arrangement with the Council of People’s Commissars. In the article about Neurath in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the biographical section does not mention his collaboration with the Soviet government. There is no way this kind of information would have been omitted had he done the same work in Berlin, rather than Moscow.
To continue with the analogy, here is a rhetorical question: If a doyen of a philosophical movement worked for Joseph Goebbels’s State Ministry for Propaganda without any of his fellow philosophers ever batting an eye, can we imagine a historian of philosophy claiming that members of that philosophical movement were “always on the side of the angels” and that they rejected Nazism?
1 According to Karl Menger, also a Vienna Circle member, Hahn was “a convinced socialist” and he “always articulated his unpopular leftist convictions freely and forcefully” (Menger 1994, 58).
2 Physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was involved on the side of the forces that crushed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, later said: “Pillage and robbery, of which I myself once had direct experience, made the expression ‘Räterepublik’ [Soviet Republic] appear to be a synonym for lawless conditions” (Cassidy 2009, 53).
3 Max Weber was a witness at the trial, and although he had put in many good words for Neurath in the hope of making a lighter sentence more probable, he still couldn’t help expressing surprise that Neurath did not admit the obvious and simply say: “Yes, that corresponded to my beliefs and I stayed because the government wanted to realize those ideas that I regarded as correct” (quoted in Neider 1999, 307).
4 VOKS was an abbreviation (in Russian) for All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which was “primarily a propaganda arm of Soviet power working in close contact with the Party hierarchy, Comintern, Commissariat Ministry of Foreign Affairs and secret police” (Clark 2011, 39; emphasis added).
5 Departing Moscow, Neurath could not return to Vienna because the police were looking for him there. He received a warning in a coded message sent to him from Vienna that said “Carnap is waiting for you.” This meant he should avoid Austria and Germany and go to Holland via Prague, where Carnap was teaching at the time (Sigmund 2015, 264).
6 Robin Kinross (1994, 73) thinks that since the graph is not signed “Institut IZOSTAT” and is not up to their usual standard in some other respects, it should not be taken to represent the work of Neurath’s group. But his view is refuted by the fact that Neurath’s main collaborator, Gerd Arntz, did include this very graph in the book describing the approach to symbols and statistics that he developed together with Neurath (Arntz et al. 1979). Let me add that in order to reprint the graph (Figure 2.1) here, I had to ask Gerd Arntz Estate for permission. It was also reproduced in Stadler 1982 (259).
7 This was not an isolated case. Neurath and his associates used to include in their graphs similar projections based merely on the wishful thinking of the Soviet government: “This visual statement of future success was a typical feature in IZOSTAT charts” (http://isotyperevisited.org/2009/09/the-second-five-year-plan-in-construction.html)
8 There is evidence that the scales finally fell from Neurath’s eyes in 1939 when he became “completely depressed” after the Hitler-Stalin pact (Neider 1999, 330). But we should also remember that those who were completely depressed by Stalin’s becoming Hitler’s ally in 1939 were typically those who had placed blind faith in Stalin and the Soviet Union up until the signing of the pact.
9 Interestingly, Nancy Cartwright tried the same “Look, it’s not all as bad as it could have been!” defense in another philosophico-political scandal in which she was also involved. When Saif Gaddafi (son of the Libyan satrap Muammar Gaddafi) applied to a PhD program at the London School of Economics in 2003, Cartwright urged the Department of Government to accept his application although she herself said at the time that Saif could do a PhD only if he “agreed to hiring a tutor again [!] and to having lessons to improve his English” (www.woolflse.com/dl/woolf-lse-report.pdf, 32). After the Department of Government rejected Saif’s application, he was nevertheless accepted by the Philosophy Department and Cartwright agreed to be his main supervisor, although the topic of his dissertation was outside her academic competence. She insisted later, rather oddly, that “there is nothing objectionable about a situation where a main supervisor is an academic who confesses she is not an expert on the matters in the thesis” (ibid., 37). And when it turned out subsequently that parts of Saif’s dissertation were plagiarized, Cartwright commented: “I can hardly be confident that nobody else helped him since there’s evidence that he lifted bits, but I’m confident that it isn’t in the sense done by anybody else start to finish” (www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/lse-insider-claims-gaddafi-donation-was-lsquoopenly-joked-aboutrsquo-2240488.html). Again, is this easily detectable instance of academic dishonesty supposed to be somehow less worrying and embarrassing (especially for the principal supervisor)just because the plagiarism did not amount to 100 percent? It would be hard to deny that Cartwright and other philosophers bear a large degree of responsibility for this whole affair and for the fact that LSE was later ridiculed and referred to as the “Libyan School of Economics” and “the London School of Useful Idiots” (Martins 2011, 287).
