A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #5–Otto Neurath.

(Schuringa, 2025)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Myth of Socially Disconnected Analytic Philosophy

3. The Death of Moritz Schlick

4. The Vienna Circle Takes On the German Philosophical Society

5. Otto Neurath

6. Rudoph Carnap

7. Hans Hahn

8. Philipp Frank

9. Edgar Zilsel

10. Rose Rand

11. Susan Stebbing

12. Russell and Moore

13. Michael Dummett

14. Schuringa’s Philosophical Hallucinations

15. Analytic Philosophy in the Cold War Deep Freezer

16. Analytic Philosophy and Angela Davis

17. Jean van Heijenoort

18. Noam Chomsky

19. On the Origins of Neoliberalism and Austrian Economics

20. On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment”

21. The Horkheimer-Neurath Reconciliation Attempt

22. The Punch Bowl Revisited

REFERENCES

The following essay,* by EJ Spode,** will be published here in 22 installments; this, the fifth, contains section 5.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #5

5. Otto Neurath

Above all, the fight against metaphysics and theology means the destruction of bourgeois ideology. (Neurath, 1931)

Otto Neurath and icons from his ISOTYPE iconic language

Schuringa can’t deny that members of the circle were politically active, but he can downplay their political activism. Well, he can try anyway. For example, while everyone I know would identify Otto Nerath as a socialist, Schuringa isn’t having it. In his view, Neurath’s political project fell “short of even the most minimal precepts of socialism.” Hmmm, let’s see about that….

We can start with a little history. At the end of the First World War, in 1918, as the war turned against Germany, Kurt Eisner of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) mobilized antiwar protestors and then members of the army against the Bavarian government, and in so doing forced the abdication of King Ludwig III of Bavaria. Eisner became minister-president of the newly proclaimed Free State of Bavaria (or People’s State of Bavaria). In 1919, Eisner offered Neurath a chance to pitch his economic ideas to an actual socialist government. Neurath thus traveled to a wildly turbulent Munich to meet with Eisner and his political party. There were bumps in that road.

On February 21, 1919, Eisner (who was planning to resign his position) was assassinated by right-wing extremist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Pandemonium broke out in parliament, shots were fired, and MPs fled through windows and down drainpipes. On March 7, 1919, The Social Democratic Party (SPD) took control and nominated former schoolteacher Johannes Hoffmann as new leader. Hoffman appointed Neurath to his administrative position in the government. Officially, Neurath was Präsident des Zentralwirtschaftsamtes (President of the Central Economic Office). Then things got messier.

On April 7, 1919, the Communisty Party (the KPD) and the USPD proclaimed the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, forcing Hoffman’s SPD government into exile. Neurath somehow convinced the new government that his office was “nonpolitical” and that he should stay on to carry on his economic work. A social activist and poet, Ernst Toller, was declared the new leader of the revolutionary government. The new government consisted of the Central Council, dominated by anarchists and intellectuals; among them were anarchist writer Gustav Landauer, merchant Silvio Gesell, and playwright Erich Mühsam (we will return to all three shortly). Toller referred to the event as the “Bavarian Revolution of Love,” and his government became widely known as “the regime of the coffeehouse anarchists.” It lasted for six days.

On April 13, Toller’s government was ousted in a putsch organized by the Communist Party (KPD). The new head of state was now Russian-German Bolshevik, Eugen Leviné. Back in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was delighted to get this news, and announced that “The liberated working class is celebrating its anniversary not only in Soviet Russia but in… Soviet Bavaria.”

Neurath was still there, only now the communists gave him a promotion! Neurath was promoted to the Council of Ombudsmen, where he continued implementing his socialization plans, but now Gesell was placed underneath him to handle more pedestrian financial issues. Neurath was the economic planner now.

On April 13, Hoffmann’s SPD government-in-exile sent forces to Munich. The first armed clash occurred, resulting in 80 injured and 21 deaths, but Leviné’s PDK forces won. But then, on May 3, the German Army (under control of the SPD) came in and shut down the Bavarian Soviet Republic for good. It had lasted less than a month in total, with two distinct phases: Toller’s anarchist-influenced government (6 days) and Leviné’s Communist government (about 3 weeks). Neurath was there for it all.

Vote communists! [PDK] Not these enemies of the workers!

The free state was abolished, and its leaders arrested or executed. Neurath was charged with being an accessory to treason and sentenced to eighteen months of confinement, although ultimately his sentence was commuted, and he was banished from Bavaria (I would say that is a win-win for Neurath).

This leaves us with the question of what Neurath was up to in his economic office, and the simplest way to put it is that he had definite ideas about how a socialist state could and should be organized. Here is how Thomas Uebel laid out Neurath’s economic project in a paper called “Intersubjective Accountability: Politics and Philosophy in the Left Vienna Circle”:

The politics at issue here are not simply the reformist policies of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAPÖ)—which both Neurath and Carnap were members of—but much more radical schemes of social transformation. Importantly, what I here call Neurath’s socialization theory were his plans for the economic reorganization of society and their theoretical underpinnings – not whatever normative arguments may be used to agitate for these plans.

Neurath developed his socialization theory and promoted the associated program mainly in the years 1917–1921, so his involvement anticipated but also outlasted the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War One. At issue for him was a reorganization of the entire economy of a nation that did not concentrate on the appropriation of the ownership of the means of production by the workers’ state and their organs, but on the appropriation of the executive power to decide the use of these means of production. This meant the abolishment of the market and its “invisible hand” in coordinating the economic actions of state, firms and individuals. The economy was to become subject to a comprehensive plan by which the conditions of life of all members of the society were to be improved, and every enterprise within the economy was to play its designated role. (Uebel, 2020)

Neurath’s work differed from the socialism that we became accustomed to seeing in the 20^th-century—top-down social planning in which elites in Moscow or some such place dictated how things were to be managed. Neurath had a different vision. He was a bottom-up socialist. The idea was to have planned economies, but to have the proletariat actually choose those plans. So, for example, the role of experts was not to decide and implement policy, but to present and explain options for plans that the people’s representatives would vote on. It then became critical for the planners to present the options in a way that everyone could understand. And this is where the pedagogical part of Neurath’s project came in, and this is what ultimately motivated his icon-base ISOTYPE system. It was part of his idea that planners needed to help workers make informed decisions. It is also a source for the demand for clarity in Analytic philosophy, a theme we will return to later.

Again from Thomas Uebel:

Here we reach a point that is all too easily lost when we think of Neurath as a theoretician of planned economies and associate the latter only with the Soviet Union. There the economic plans were weapons of the vanguard party that made decisions for the proletariat. Neurath’s schemes, however, did not embody this top-down approach. Even though he generally bracketed questions of the organization of political power (a point on which he was criticized by fellow socialists) … his numerous economic organizational plans, varied for different audiences and circumstances of application, all have this in common: the planners had to submit their plans as proposals for evaluation and possible approval to the “people’s representatives.” The experts did not have the last word: their role was to show what was doable, but they did not make decisions about what was to be done. Neurath’s conception of the planner’s role was non-prescriptive and democratic.

[…]

To make rational decisions possible, the planners had to show not only what was doable, but also how it was doable. Thus they were not just tasked to develop one comprehensive economic plan, but several. The people’s representatives were not constrained to accept or reject one more or less fully developed plan, but free to select one from different plans on offer. This highlights what can be called the “empowering” aspect of the enlightenment ambition of Neurath’s conception: it is not just choice that is the matter here, but informed choice, for any such choice was to be made in awareness of what alternatives are foregone. (Uebel, 2020)

Illustration of home vs factory weavers in Neurath’s ISOTYPE system.

Given all this, why does Schuringa think he can say that Neurath’s socialism fell “short of even the most minimal precepts of socialism”? How is this not socialism on any conception of socialism? Well, Schuringa has “arguments” but they are pretty thin.

Schuringa draws on exactly two criticisms, neither having anything to do with Neurath’s theory, but rather from what went down in 1919, according to the personal history of the Bavarian Republic by the aforementioned anarchist writer and playwright, Erich Mühsam (who was later tortured to death by Nazis). And here, we have to understand that the criticism is not coming directly from Mühsam, but rather from Mühsam as filtered by Schuringa’s scholarship.

First, Schuringa says that Mühsam “criticized the indiscriminateness with which Neurath presented his ideas to the bourgeoisie, as well as to the working class.”

One minor problem here. Mühsam, strictly speaking, didn’t say that. He was reporting what some others thought of Neurath. Here is the relevant passage in Mühsam’s account:

[Neurath] presented himself to the RAR (Revolutionary Workers’ Council), was invited by the Munich Workers’ Council to deliver a lecture, and aroused strong interest among the workers, although he was personally met with some suspicion. This suspicion was grounded in the complete indiscriminateness with which Neurath presented his ideas even to the most backward/unenlightened bourgeois circles. (Mühsam, 1929; my translation/my emphasis)

Still, you can see why there would be some suspicion. Why was this Austrian professor blabbing to the bourgeoisie about the plans for a socialist state? In this, Neurath simply couldn’t help himself. He was addicted to explaining his ideas about everything to everybody.

Schuringa’s second objection to Neurath is that Mühsam claimed Neurath was “dilettantish.” I think Schuringa wants us to read that in the English language sense of “dilettantish” as saying Neurath was just someone with a casual interest in such matters and that he was ill-informed. That is a crazy charge to throw at Neurath, who was obsessed with the administration of socialist economies and wrote volumes on the topic (Neurath, 2004). He had at that point devoted the better part of his adult life to it. Once again, Schuringa misrepresents what Mühsam was writing. “Dilettantish” is just a bad translation of “dilettantische”—it’s a false cognate here. In the context of 20th-century German political writing, the expression means something more like “politically naïve.” This certainly makes sense in the context of Mühsam’s writing, if we replace ‘dilettantish’ with ‘politically naïve’:

The [political naïvete] of his approach consisted only in this: he believed these measures could be carried out without interfering with the political constitution of the country. He was fond of saying that he would work with any government that allowed him to work undisturbed—whether it was an absolutist-monarchist one or a council republic was all the same to him. (Schuringa, 2025)

Naïve in hindsight, perhaps, but in the case of Bavaria he was almost successful in this, since he did convince three governments in succession to implement his plans. It worked. Until it didn’t and he got charged with being an accessory to high treason.

Erich Mühsam and young Otto Neurath

Whether Neurath was naïve or not, it is not correct to infer that Neurath’s views were not radical by socialist standards. As we noted, it was part of his project to eliminate money, not eventually, but right away.

There are other socialists who have advocated the same, including Pyotr Kropotkin (Wikipedia, 2026d), Anton Pannekoek (Wikipedia, 2026e) and the council communists, and Anarcho-syndicalist Spain (1936–3199), where wages actually were abolished in many collectivized industries and replaced with communal vouchers or direct provision. Neurath’s project was much more radical than what was happening in the Soviet Union at the time, which had adopted a system of money and wages.

My point here is not that Neurath was right, or that he wasn’t politically naïve, but that it is just insane to say that his political radicalism was “falling short of even the most minimal precepts of socialism.” Neurath’s ideas and projects were squarely within the socialist project and were radical, even by today’s standards.

The other important thing to understand was that for Neurath, this kind of socialist, informed-worker economic planning was completely interwoven with the project of logical positivism. In particular, Neurath’s socialism was directly tied to his attacks on metaphysics. For Neurath, metaphysics, like religion, was a great obstacle to economic justice.

It may even run a bit deeper than that. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, in his book The Myth of Disenchantment argues that Neurath felt that by undoing the bourgeois metaphysical structures, the natural life of the proletariat could be restored:

Positivists have often been criticized for being apolitical, but Neurath, at least, put his politics into practice in a way unmatched by any of the major thinkers in the Frankfurt School. Neurath made explicit the political motivations for the revolt against metaphysics in Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf (Lifestyle and class struggle, 1928). As a whole, the monograph is largely an attempt to emphasize that “scientific attitude and solidarity go together.” Neurath’s main argument is that science is a natural complement to the lifestyle of the proletariat; members of the working class are naturally grounded in a commonsense scientific outlook because they are interested in concrete and practical matters like working conditions, safety, access to safe food, and clean drinking water. In a similar fashion, he argued, they are also unencumbered by the intellectual traditions that govern the life of the bourgeois class. (Josephson-Storm, 2017)

Those “intellectual traditions that govern the life of the bourgeois class” were, as I noted, their abstract metaphysical and formal religious theories. Such theories were corrupt, serving only the bourgeoisie, directing their energies toward projects that benefited no one. Such theories also numbed people to the concerns of individuals while fetishizing abstract concepts such as the German State. In other words, the entire positivist project was not some doctrine that cut people off from their everyday concerns, as Schuringa contends. To the contrary, the entire project was specifically designed to restore concern for the practical everyday needs of people.

On Neurath’s view, class revolution required overthrowing both theology and metaphysics. His campaign against metaphysics was Marxist. In his words, “The cultivation of scientific, unmetaphysical thought, its application above all to social occurrences, is quite Marxist.” The critique of metaphysics, therefore, functioned first and foremost as a critique of ideology. And this brings us back to the epigraph from Neurath at the beginning of this section: “Above all, the fight against metaphysics and theology means the destruction of bourgeois ideology.”

Download