98 © 2017 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00168 Otto Neurath (1882–1945) was an activist on many fronts, a pedagogue and agitator for social change, whose work bore witness to some of the most dramatic ruptures in the first half of the 20th century. His interests lay not only in intellectual knowledge, but in producing the social conditions for its development, distribution, and employment. According to Elisabeth Nemeth, Neurath’s organizing ability was what especially helped him to establish the renowned Vienna Circle of philosophers as a group with more or less well-defined program- matic positions. 1 That programmatic approach often led to criticism for an overly technical understanding of politics with strong inclina- tions toward social engineering (a suspicion most famously voiced by Otto Bauer, the left-wing thinker of Austrian Marxism). 2 But it was also an approach through which Neurath sought to apply his own theoretical positions in practice, beginning with his attempts to turn his experiences with the war economy (that is, with the successful state- organized attempts at dealing with the scarcity of goods) into collec- tivization programs and modes of planned economy (in both Saxony and Bavaria, where Neurath was a minister for planned economy in 1 Elisabeth Nemeth, Otto Neurath und der Wiener Kreis: Revolutionäre Wissenschaftlichkeit als Anspruch (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1981), 11. 2 Günther Sandner, Otto Neurath: Eine politische Biographie (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2014), 134. OTTO NEURATH’S VISUAL POLITICS AN INTRODUCTION TO “PICTORIAL STATISTICS FOLLOWING THE VIENNA METHOD” JOHAN FREDERIK HARTLE DOCUMENT/INTRODUCTION