The proposed paper intends to revisit from a historical and theoretical viewpoint the experience of the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, founded in 1924 in Vienna, by investigating, in particular, its rationale and its methodology as they emerge from the programmatic texts of its founding director, Otto Neurath.

Neurath (1991[1925a], p. 1) stated that “[t]he present demands from all of us an intellectual acquisition of the societal nexus. Today we cannot any longer confine general education to reading, reckoning and writing and to some knowledge in the field of natural sciences, literature and history; it is necessary also to elucidate societal processes and make their becoming understandable.” The foundation of the Museum responded to these demands, in particular in the field of adult education.

To capture the goals and the educational specificities of the Museum in a formula, we could state that it aspired to be an educational space aimed at the humanization of science in favour of the lower classes, within the framework of a lifelong learning project based upon a new curriculum and an innovative pedagogy.

I will unpack this formula by contending that Neurath’s proposal represented a ‘transition’ at three levels. Firstly, although deeply rooted in the cultural and political atmosphere of the Red Vienna and of educational initiatives in favour of the working class, the Museum represented a break with the practices undertaken by the social-democratic scholars involved in the education of the masses: indeed, despite their best intentions these educational projects risked perpetuating a gulf between the intellectual elite and the working class. In contrast, Neurath (1996[1945]) invoked a shift from the popularization of science (fundamentally top-down) to the bottom-up approach of the humanization of science.

This general shift resulted, secondly, in a change in pedagogy: while the typical, Bildung-oriented education championed by the Viennese social-democracy tended to conform with the ‘ideology of the information through books’ (in the sense of De Certeau, 1990), Neurath advocated a pedagogy that implied “to a certain extent a departure from the predominantly ‘scholastic’ tradition, aimed at words and concepts” and appealed to “visual education”. He captured this shift in the phrase: “What can be shown through an image must not be said in words” (Neurath, 1991[1933], p. 243).

Appealing to visual education met three needs:

1. avoiding any pedagogy that could instil a sense of inferiority in the adults to be educated (Neurath, 1991[1931b], p. 206);
2. deploying a pedagogy that was able to promote an “empirical attitude”, this requirement being in line with Neurath’s epistemological approach (based upon the idea of a ‘physicalistic language’);
3. proposing a kind of pedagogy that was in tune with “the visual scene” of a modern society dominated by advertising (Neurath 1996[1945], p. 291). To achieve this goal, not all images were educationally significant but ‘factual images’ (Sachbilder) had to be ‘created,’ which could allow subjects to gain an understanding of social facts;

Indeed, the third ‘transition’ occurred at the level of ‘contents’: the core of the Museum’s curriculum was statistics, which represented in Neurath’s view a major access route to the understanding of society. While other social-democratic intellectuals insisted on a fairly traditional curriculum, based on the model of German Bildung, also for adult education in non formal settings, Neurath used his Museum as a space of lifelong learning aimed at equipping individuals with that knowledge and those thinking skills that seemed to him pivotal in order for them to be active participants in a progressive democratic society. The emphasis on statistics, moreover, responded to the need for education for empirical thinking, which Neurath considered the pillar of any democracy-oriented reconstruction of society.

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