This chapter summarizes Neurath’s manifold achievements before 1934, when he was forced to leave Vienna. Neurath managed to fit several careers into one, relatively short lifetime, being active in education, urbanism, economic planning, museology, graphic design, and philosophy. After an account of his student years, we document his participation in the proto-Vienna Circle, his theories of war economy, and his attempt at socialization in revolutionary Bavaria. Back in Vienna, Neurath became director of the Austrian settlers’ organization, involved in architectural planning, and founded the Social and Economic Museum, where a team of collaborators developed the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (later known as Isotype). Neurath was also a founding member of the Vienna Circle, alongside Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Hahn. Neurath was a dissenting voice from the Circle’s prevalent adulation for Wittgenstein.

Neurath’s interest in international languages led to him developing an alternative to verbal language, the pictorial technique of Isotype. This chapter documents significant wartime projects using this method, including animated sections for documentary films and charts for publications produced by pioneering ‘book packager’ Adprint. The Isotype Institute contributed to the book on Lancelot Hogben’s own invented language Interglossa. Neurath also explored the establishment of a research centre for visual education in consultation with Hogben, Julian Huxley, and US ambassador J. G. Winant. His last book project titled ‘Visual Education’ was written for Karl Mannheim’s ‘International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction’, although it remained unpublished until long after his death. It was a wide-ranging reflection on the acquisition of knowledge and its social determinacy.