ABSTRACT
As a central European polymath, with an accompanying broad array of interest and activities, Otto Neurath must be comprehended through multiple contexts that nonetheless form a coherent intellectual and historical backdrop to his work and ideas. This emerges most clearly through three major areas of inquiry and influence for Neurath, all affecting his approach to and understanding of economics: (1) the decades-long philosophical inquiry that underlay and informed the thinking of the Vienna Circle; (2) the intellectual currents shaping the thought of the German Historical School and that of other heterodox and utopian thinkers prior to World War I; and (3) an engagement with socialism and Marxism that took hold during the war years.
