Some Ideas for The New Museum of Society and Economy

Otto Neurath's vision for the Museum of Society and Economy was the creation of a cultural center designed for the working classes that would educate them about production, emigration, mortality, interior furnishing, unemployment, and the mechanisms of industry, among others, ultimately as a means of stimulating the growth of a community. (55-57)

"According to Tonnies, Gesellschaft seeks to objectify and standardize human interactions, while Gemeinschaft spiritualizes and tries to make subjective everyday human affairs." (22)

Having read the seminal work by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Otto Neurath's concepts of communal living and urbanisation were transformed. As with Karl Marx, whose ideas had already been published in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Tonnies looked at the distribution of power across the various strata of society from a socio-historical perspective, observing that the State becomes increasingly dominant over time to the detriment of the working classes, and other power structures such as the Church. This conflict summarises the tension between Tonnies' concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft - in which the former is the agrarian community constructed around the pillars of the Church and the Family, and the latter being the construction of civil society, built around the state, the city, and industrial production.

Neurath's belief in the importance of Gemeinschaft was further developed while in Vienna after the first World War. The influx of gypsy refugees, coupled with a housing crisis and food shortages created a semi-anarchic social system, driven by basic human needs for shelter and sustenance. During a period of coal shortages in 1923, families resorted to cutting down trees around the city for firewood. Self-organisation on a mass scale interested Neurath greatly, although maintaining a balance in the disorder/order of the social system was a complex but crucial factor in the system's success. The coal shortage provides a succinct demonstration of this importance: the disorganised destruction of woodland areas around the city was unsustainable, and threatened longer-term effects. The social system, through a crisis of food, housing, and fuel, had become entropic. The laws that had maintained order in the system were no longer governed by a centralised authority, but completely decentralised: decided ad-hoc by individuals in order to satisfy their basic needs, and those of their families.

Neurath sought to create a system that would allow the formation of communities around a basis of self-help urbanism, but with a degree of decentralised management that would control the entropic state of the system. His method of "ordered disorder" was essentially the creation of a network within which the municipality and the localised co-operative movements could communicate. Neurath believed that social housing projects and allotment gardening initiatives could help create a communal economy - Gemeinwirtschaft, providing the working class with a much greater degree of autonomy within the class system.

Neurath wanted to use the methods of gesellschaft to stimulate the aspects of gemeinschaft that would benefit the working classes. "The metropolis needed to be weaned off the money-market economy and be governed by a system that harnessed the power of barter collectives, trust-based relationships, self-help interest groups, agricultural cooperatives and other informational economic agents. (25)

The emergence of the mass audience at the beginning of the 20th century created a new visual language for communicating social concepts. Stimulated by the mechanics of gesellschaft - namely rapid production in the newspaper industry, centralisation of population, and the rise in popularity of the public cinema -