Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

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was written for Karl Mannheim’s ‘International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction’, although it remained unpublished until long after his death.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.

Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.