„The “Continuous Line from the Formulations of the Magicians to the Formulations of the Sociologists”. Otto Neurath on the Anthropology of Magic and Religion“

The present text deals with Neurath’s quest for a non-metaphysical sociology of magic and religion and takes into account a broader spectrum of anthropological positions known to him in the late twenties and early thirties. Neurath is a notoriously fierce critic of Einfühlung and Verstehen. Nevertheless, he appreciates the anthropologist’s practical virtue of empathy. He insists that the difference between westerners and the peoples then studied by anthropologists should not be overstated. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of the two mentalities provides a peculiar justification for the more general disposition to present the so-called ‘primitives’ as being stranger than they actually are. Against Lévy-Bruhl’s theory, Neurath sets two quite different views of anthropology, Malinowski’s functionalism, the cutting edge at the time, and Frazer’s quite old-fashioned anthropology, which Neurath finds even more congenial. It may seem strange, but in order to show that ‘magic’ only apparently goes back to a completely different 'mentality', Neurath builds on Frazer's analogy between magic and technology. He also embraces the principled distinction between magic and religion. Hence Neurath’s reflections on this range of subjects are in many respects antipodal to Wittgenstein's much better-known sustained criticism of The Golden Bough. The author of Empirical sociology intends to pursue “‘political economy’ and 'history' as ‘ethnology of our age’”. With this optimistic and modernist drive, Neurath sees the peoples he keeps calling ‘primitives’ more positively than Frazer and the evolutionary tradition but is less sensitive to cultural differences than the British and American anthropologists of his own generation.