Otto Neurath’s Theory of Felicitology and the Will to Socialization

Abstract

It has been assumed that the logical empiricism of ‘the Vienna Circle’(Wiener Kreis) greatly influenced on the formalization of utility and rationality in welfare economics in the 1930s. However the actual historical relationship between logical empiricism and economic science in the early twentieth century has not been still sufficiently examined in the literatures on the history of economic thought. In the 1910s, Otto Neurath (1882–1945), the leader of the Circle, was developing, as economic science, an empirical study on human welfare, titled ‘Felicitology’ that was rather different from the ‘new’ welfare economics. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate Neurath’s felicitology as ‘the other welfare economics’ and its relation to his ideas on socialization and planning. Through this investigation, I show the possibilities of the empirical and critical economics developed from the philosophy of logical empiricism in the early twentieth century, which are markedly different from the ‘rational choice’ model as a purely psychological discipline based on formalized ‘self-interests’. The analysis would also present a critical perspective on the conventional interpretation of the relationship between social sciences and logical empiricism.KeywordsOtto NeurathLogical empiricismFelicitology Homo economicus RationalitySocialization