Economy, Ideology and Culture: Otto Neurath's Approach to a Precarious Relationship

Abstract

The concept of base and superstructure has been one of the hotly debated issues in Marxist theory. Otto Neurath, who considered Marxism to be decisive for empirical sociology, accepted the significance of economic conditions as a driving force in the historical process. In contrast to Max Weber and Werner Sombart, he put the importance of ideas and the “capitalist spirit” into perspective. However, he also generally rejected the idea of economic determinism that was then very common among Marxists. In assuming a “coherence” of social structure, mode of production, way of life and (political) ideology, Neurath’s approach enabled even an extensive understanding of cultural phenomena. Although he never elaborated a cultural theory (and was sceptical of then-contemporary concepts), his assumptions on this subject are worth considering. In the preface to one of the most influential books of socialist theory, Karl Marx’s “Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), a frequently quoted phrase was established. “In the social production of their life,” Marx put it, “men enter into relations that are specific, necessary and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a specific stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the real basis, from which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond specific forms of social consciousness. “That means that”(t)he mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process generally. It is not the consciousness of men that specifies their being, but on the contrary their social being that specifies their consciousness.” In the following decades or even the following century, the base-superstructure conception became an important problem in Marxist theory. On one hand, it has been very popular because of its focus on material life conditions, its radicalism and its anti-idealism as well; on the other hand, it raised some important and even