Orchestrating politics with auxiliary motives. Otto Neurath on democracy

Otto Neurath's views on democracy, part of the largely forgotten political legacy of logical empiricism, emerged from his early theoretical reflections on human decision-making in terms of "auxiliary motives." After further refinement during his engagement with Austromarxism and the Vienna Circle, it was only in his final years in Britain that Neurath articulated an explicitly democratic perspective, combining auxiliary motives with the idea of "orchestrating" politics within a framework of "scientific humanism." This perspective remains strikingly relevant today, as it allows us to conceive of politics as both grounded in scientific and expert knowledge and responsive to the attitudes and preferences of ordinary citizens. This paper first provides a historical outline and then characterizes Neurath's views by introducing the notion of an unsystematic hierarchy of norms, which helps to demonstrate how auxiliary motives are necessary for arriving at concrete decisions within a framework of scientific humanism.