The Viennese Otto Neurath (1882-1945) , once stigmatized as a volcanic revolutionary, poor in theory as rich in reforming enthusiasm, has only recently been rediscovered as an economist and his economic writings have been republished and...
moreThe Viennese Otto Neurath (1882-1945) , once stigmatized as a volcanic revolutionary, poor in theory as rich in reforming enthusiasm, has only recently been rediscovered as an economist and his economic writings have been republished and partially translated in English . This paper analyzes the early years of Otto Neurath’s scientific activity, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when particular attention was given by him to war economics.
Otto Neurath excluded any kind of ethical prejudice from restricting economic analysis. Acquiring methods as war and smuggling should, in his view, be studied exactly as market exchange and production. “That pillage – he wrote – is prohibited by law, should not impede economists from studying it. Why should the consequences of trade and domestic manufacture be worth to be analyzed, while the effects of smuggling are ignored? In consequence of such considerations war has been vastly ignored by economists as a form of acquisition (…)” .
Far away from any interventionist stance, Neurath considered the Balkan wars and WWI as an extraordinary occasion to gather information about the emerging of barter trade, even at international level , the centralized administration of production, the controlled distribution of consumption goods and the destabilizing or even vanishing of financial systems. His extraordinary efforts in this field were recognized not only with a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an official commendation from the Austrian government, but also with the appointment as director of the Museum of War Economy in Leipzig in 1916 .
Above all, studying a war economy in its development meant, for Neurath, the possibility to demonstrate that a certain grade of administrative control over the economy, based on a general system of in-kind calculations, could prevent what he considered the worst trait of market economies: economic crises. An isotype in particular, of his volume of 1939, bears testimony of such stance. The image illustrates a statistic on coal production in the United States between 1914 and 1936, underlining how in 1917, a year of war, production steadily remained on its maximum capacity, showing no sign of seasonal or cyclical fluctuation.
As early as 1913, in his essay: Probleme der Kriegswirtschaftslehre , Neurath went a step further: “The present underemployment of existing forces, that is typical of our Ordnung, incites to war: it is necessary, for example, to defend oneself from foreign wares and foreign laborers or oblige others to buy our wares or accept our workers, and all of this because it is not spontaneous to enter in cooperative relations between states; furthermore it is easy to alleviate the costs of war thanks to reparations; and lastly because at times war frees productive forces that would otherwise be bound. The uneconomic construction of our Lebensordnung is the cause why at present war causes lesser evils than in a more economical Lebensordnung the case would be” .
To eradicate war, in Neurath’s view, mankind had only two alternatives. The first would have been to render it uneconomical. A second opportunity to foster peace, obviously, would have been to abandon the present inefficient Lebensordnung for a more effective one. To decide, though, which Lebensordnung to implement in reality was not the task of an economist. Neurath continued so, instead, to offer to the attention of politicians economic organizational alternatives to market economy, all the while steadily collecting statistical data and transforming it in easily understandable isotypes, in order to enable the largest possible strata of population to decide about their future.
