THE PHILOSOPHERS ONLY interpreted the world in their various ways, asserted Karl Marx in a much-cited thesis, but what really matters is to change it. Empirical social researchers in Red Vienna intended to overcome this antithesis: to change society it is necessary to understand it first. The knowledge of how things are belongs alongside the awareness that they could also be different. This demand for evidence-based policy is what creates the space for utopias that are more than mere fantasies, but it also becomes a utopia in itself when facts no longer form the basis for political decisions.

At a time when sociology in Austria was not yet clearly distinguished from economics, political science, and philosophy, some of the most original contributions to its development as a discipline came not from the universities but from research institutions closely connected to three people and their circle in Red Vienna: Käthe Leichter (1895–1942), Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), and Marie Jahoda (1907–2001).

Käthe Leichter worked from 1925 to 1934 at the Austrian Chamber for Workers and Employees (Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte) in Vienna, where she founded and directed the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer). As a sociologist, commentator, and activist, she is one of the outstanding personalities of Red Vienna. She had gone to court to obtain the right, as a woman, to study political science at the University of Vienna from 1914 to 1917. But she still had to go to Germany to sit for her final exams, earning her doctorate in 1918 at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Max Weber. In 1919 she became Otto Bauer's research assistant.

Her study of women industrial workers, published in 1932 by the Chamber of Labor, is of extraordinary significance, not least in the form in which it is presented: quantitative findings are embedded in qualitative ones, no statistic is left without commentary, and no numerical relationship lacks reflection as to its methodical, social, and political implications. One particularly vivid chapter is devoted to typical life stories and corresponds with the visualization of statistical relationships with pictograms from Otto Neurath's Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) in Vienna. Internal contradictions or unexpected and inconvenient results are not covered up but are critically articulated.