Learning from Franz L. Neumann

David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland

Description

An examination of Franz Neumann’s social and political theory in the context of his career as a learner and teacher

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann’s case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct.

"Learning from Franz Neumann" pays special attention to Neumann’s efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking.

Contents; I. The Challenge of Franz L. Neumann; II. Social Constitution, Social Power, and Responsibility: Neumann and Labor Advocacy; III. Power, Resistance, and Constitutions; IV. Franz Neumann’s Commemoration of Exile; V. After Weimar: The First Exile; VI. Neumann’s Second Exile: Negotiating the Politics of Research; VII. No Happy End: Unprofitable Negotiations; VIII. Behemoth: Wars Can Be Lost; IX. Franz Neumann in Washington: The Political Intellectual at War; X. Franz Neumann in the University: La guerre est finie; XI. The Legacy: Four Studies; Conclusion; Index.

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783089994
• Langue: English

Extrait

Learning from Franz L. Neumann
Learning from Franz L. Neumann
Law, Theory and the Brute Facts of Political Life
David Kettler
Thomas Wheatland
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland 2019
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-997-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-997-0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 The Challenge of Franz L. Neumann
Chapter 2 Social Constitution, Social Power and Responsibility: Neumann and Labor Advocacy
Marxism and Law
Neumann’s First Studies: The State and Coercion
Labor, Law and the Republic
Neumann and the Promise of Labor Law
Chapter 3 Power, Resistance and Constitutions
The Rise of Cartels
Resisting the Resistance to the Weimar Regime
A Constitution within the Constitution
The Question of Pluralism: Franz Neumann and Carl Schmitt
Complementarity between Legal Authority and Social Power
The Last Defense of the Weimar Regime
Chapter 4 Franz Neumann’s Commemoration of Exile
Chapter 5 After Weimar: The First Exile
Overview of Neumann’s Writings in England, 1933–36
A Cautionary Postmortem for English Readers
Critique and Self-Critique: Anti-Fascism
A Second Academic Dissertation: Can Law (Still) Rule?
Law, Sociology and the Puzzle of Rationality
The Usable Legacy: Thomas Aquinas to Hegel
A Defense of Rule of Law in the Liberal Nation-State
The Distinctive Character of the Rechtsstaat
The Destruction of Law in Germany
Inconclusive Conclusions: Law after Liberalism
Chapter 6 Neumann’s Second Exile: Negotiating the Politics of Research
Neumann’s Contested Place
The Quest to Explicate the Research Methodologies of the Frankfurt School
A Practical Bargain: Recasting the Research Proposal for Anti-Semitism
Chapter 7 No Happy End: Unprofitable Negotiations
Anti-Fascism in America: Paul Tillich’s 1938 Theses
Pragmatic Compromise on Natural Law
The Rise and Decline of the Institute’s Germany Project
Chapter 8 Behemoth : Wars Can Be Lost
Leviathan and Behemoth
The Failure of Labor and the Dissolution of Weimar
Totalitarianism against the State
The Economic Structure and Dynamics of the National Socialist Regime
Ordering the Classes
Divided Rule
No Law: Domination Through Organization, Isolation and Harm
No Political Theory—Not a State
Chapter 9 Franz Neumann in Washington: The Political Intellectual at War
Neumann Comes to the Office of Strategic Services
A Brief Introduction to the Structure and Organization of OSS’s R&A Division
The Early Analyses of Nazi Germany: The Pre-Neumann Years
Neumann at OSS: Analyses of Nazi Germany, 1943–44
An Alternative Reading: Neumann as “Ruff”
Adapting to the Brute Facts: 1944–45
Preparation for the Nuremburg Trials
Chapter 10 Franz Neumann in the University: La guerre est finie
American Policy for Postwar Germany: Analysis and Advocacy
The German Reeducation Project
Professor of Public Law and Government
Political Studies and the Free University of Berlin
For American Political Science: Montesquieu as Flawed Model
Democracy and Dictatorship, Summer 1951
A Brief for a New American Political Science
The Projected Classic: Political Systems and Political Theory
Chapter 11 The Legacy: Four Studies
Political Power
Political Freedom
Rationality in the Theory of Political Freedom
Volition in the Theory of Freedom
The Present Crisis
Anxiety and Politics
What Remains: Political Study and Political Education
Conclusion
Index
Chapter 1
THE CHALLENGE OF FRANZ L. NEUMANN
Franz L. Neumann was a twentieth-century political thinker compelled to address central issues of democratic political understanding that have unexpectedly returned to prominence in recent years. Above all, there are patterns of threat to the convergence of pluralist social formations and adaptive constitutional orders that appeared securely established in the predominant array of states, notably the rise of authoritarian political leaders able to secure recognition from constituencies comprised of disillusioned publics and interested centers of power. It is understandable, then, that some attention has turned to the generation of thinkers that encountered fascist rule in its various embodiments in the twentieth century, especially the classical—and worst—instance of National Socialist rule in Germany, notable among other examples of the time in that it displaced a troubled but working democracy. Much of the discussion of those cases segued into a more inclusive examination of “totalitarianism,” designed to comprehend the Soviet state as well, which shifted attention from key issues of democratic theory, notably the use of such key democratic institutions as universal suffrage to destroy democracy. Yet, that is precisely the form taken by present-day threats.
That class of questions could not be neglected by the generation of political exiles who had played an active role in the struggles of Weimar, among whom Franz Neumann was certainly the best recognized, notably after the publication of Behemoth during the course of the Second World War. Although he was never a Marxist in his political theory of the democratic state, his recourse to social analyses he learned from Marxists made it easy to put him aside in the postwar years, especially in view of his silencing by an early death. Alternatively, he could be referred to the rather amorphous entity called the “Frankfurt School,” in the light of his years of employment in Max Horkheimer’s New York Institute, and then dismissed as a lesser thinker by the scholars focused on this tendency precisely because he insisted on a political and social frame of analysis centered on issues of power and law. He certainly learned from his dealings with the Institute, but he worked as an independent scholar, as well as contributing important effort to collective ventures, as mandated by his position as a senior-level research associate. Behemoth , in fact, was expressly written outside of the terms of reference and discipline of the Institute. 1
Neumann was not a beginner when he forced into exile. His Weimar preoccupations with the legal and social prospects of the labor movement entered into his reading of democratic failure in Germany, and continued to concern him later, although mediated by the “brute facts of political life” encountered in the United States. This theme as well bears on contemporary understanding of changing social underpinnings of democracy. The aim of the present study is to make Neumann’s thought, as expressed not only in his most theoretical treatises but also in the writings incidental to his practical involvement as commentator and participant in public life, available to contemporary inquiries. The interplay between these facets of his life is integral to the strength—the “this-sidedness” of his thought. Awareness of it also helps to define the limits of any attempt to build on him in the present constellation of factors, given enough similarity to warrant the enterprise of learning from Neumann.
From his first doctoral dissertation “On the Relations between State and Punishment” (1923) to his last writings, dealing with threatening relations between anxiety and political education (1953), Neumann’s work displays three motifs. First, he engages the existing work of great thinkers, as well as empirical-historical observation, with a view to mobilizing thought for determinate purposes, all aiming to enlarge human freedom and to make political regimes decent when so many are not. At times, these purposes are immediate, including understanding the horrific so as to act against it, or, earlier, strengthening the place of the working class through law in a democratic republic; while some of them are forms of what Rawls, among others, has called realistic utopianism—reflections based on an identification of appealing outcomes just beyond our current reach. Second, his theoretical models acknowledge the coexistence of variously grounded motifs, even under optimal conditions, whose interrelationships cannot be brought to consistent theoretical harmony but must be managed by the changing interplay of political actions. Neumann’s work recurrently grasps a small number of elements—law, class, party, bound together in a complex field. These elements function as overlapping—sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic—elements and mechanisms that give sha