Christopher Burke and Ádám Tamás Tuboly, Otto Neurath in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. ix + 328, $120 (hardcover). ISBN 9781009376297.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Otto Neurath praised the merits of war economy from 1909 and argued for using his visual method in peace propaganda in 1933.He worked as the director of the Soviet IZOSTAT in the early 1930s and developed anti-Soviet visual propaganda for the British Ministry of Information from the late 1930s.He advocated the highbrow philosophy of logical empiricism in Vienna, and built a ground-to-earth, comprehensible anti-culture of visual facts called "Isotype" in London.Based on this, one might think that Neurath was changing sides and world views too frequently, which would, no doubt, make it harder to perceive him as a likeable character.But this is not necessarily the case.This impressive new book, Otto Neurath in Britain, portrays the minutiae of the misadventures of Neurath, and, by doing so, unpacks the apparent contradictions in his manysided and quite controversial legacy.Neurath is described as a person who tries to navigate through the absurd situations of the political and ideological turmoil of the 1930s to 1940s: a person who tries to stay alive, secure the well-being of his loved ones, and get the most out of his intellectual capacities.Arguably, the best chapter in the book is the third, titled "Escape and Internment."It tells the fascinating story of how Neurath escaped from the Nazioccupied Netherlands through the English Channel to Britain, and it gives an unprecedented glimpse into how it was to live in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man.The excellence of this chapter is twofold.One source of excellence is the awe-inspiring details.The reader really feels that he or she is there with Neurath and his future third wife, Marie, and experiences the excitement of the escape from the Nazis and then the microcosm of the British internment camp, a miniature, isolated world inhabited by temporary and permanent outcasts from Europe.The narrative voice here reminds us of that of the best historic novels.The sights, the noises, and the smells the characters encounter are described in a particularly vivid manner.One cannot unsee that this narrative choice might be, at the same time, a well-placed nod to the strong commitment of Neurath's logical empiricism to sensory experience.The second source of excellence is the brilliant handling of Neurath's various identities.Being a socialist, being an Austrian, being a Jewish person, being a scholar, being in a romantic relationship are all challenged in a fascinating story in which both Neurath and his environment are tinkering with the question of what does it mean to have these identities.My personal favorite is the story of Neurath and the special cheese of the orthodox Jews.After portraying the great escape and the strangeness of life on the Isle of Man, the book describes how Otto and Marie Neurath took roots in the British intellectual milieu.While Otto undoubtedly kept a stiff upper lip even in the face of grave danger, which fit
Author: Gábor István Bíró
Institution: Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408875273