Franz Neumann: An Appreciation Power and Freedom
Kirchheimer, Otto
Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre. In a drab trade he excelled in brilliance. Among circumspect searchers of validated facts...
...In the long run it may be even more important that he was at all times poignantly aware of the fact that the subject matters he dealt with, power and freedom, were both basic and unavoidable phases of human existence...
...It is in the last year of his life that psychological categories derived from Freud and Kierkegaard, which before he had not deemed meaningful in the study of social processes, came to the fore...
...He has noted the ambivalent influences of modern industrialism and the differential effects of various patterns of work discipline...
...He felt most at home there where he had a chance to dissolve and demolish traditional concepts by confronting them with the structure of political reality...
...The Free Press and The Falcon's Wing Press, Glencoe, I11...
...An answer could not be but conjectural...
...IN HIS LATER YEARS Neumann's position on the interrelationship of political and economic factors became less affirmative, revealing shifts in emphasis and evaluation...
...Among circumspect searchers of validated facts he stood out as a man of ideas and an author of challenging, daring, sometimes paradoxi• cal generalizations...
...He remained a libertarian, and increasingly skeptical, socialist...
...From his own assumptions on the rationality of man, Neumann derived an irreducible minimum of rights: equality of man, general scope of the law, exclusion of retroactive laws and some sort of independence of judicial organs...
...In his late writings Neumann seemed to reject the identity theory of democracy—ultra-democratic in the realm of concepts but anarchistic in its pragmatic effects—in favor of devices which would keep at arm's length special pressures, notably those attired in semi-corporate dress...
...His all-pervasive conviction that critical analysis of established social structures and political institutions is the political scientist's only worthwhile job, endows even fragmentary and contradictory elements of his work with a provocative 'fascination to the searching mind...
...The choice of these terms—occurring ever so much more often in his later writings—indicates what in Neumann's view constituted the yardstick of legitimate value judgment in political science: a rationally ordered non-oppressive society in which all social and organizationaI forms were arranged so as to maximize freedom of the individual...
...Yet Neumann was not a mere student of politics...
...That it was the magistral Behemoth in which he succeeded best was due to the critical quality of his mind and the unique opportunity furnished by a momentous subject...
...Having drawn, in Behemoth, the frightening picture of unlimited and unstructured power, he was intent on reestablishing the chance of a rational exercise of power—by both pruning down the realistic individual's justifiable expectations, and shifting the emphasis towards the image of a reconstructed individual, an individual living an ordered and creative rather than a synthetic existence...
...in consequence, they were—at least in part—discarded as conclusive explanations of political movement...
...He re-interpreted and shoved aside—as a Procrustean bed—the Marxian doctrine on the interplay of state and society.* • The term occurs in a significant reviewof The Law of the Soviet State, by A. Y. Vishinsky...
...and he clearly stated that judicial institutions were not sufficient by themselves effectively to guarantee the exercise of this right even there where it was based on hallowed constitutional principle...
...The remainder he assigned to the"twilight zone between conscience and social order where everybody acts at his own risk...
...But he has not probed into what this may entail for the development of totalitarian dictatorship, confining himself to the observation that atomization perpetrated via compulsory membership in totalitarian mass organizations constitutes an effective technique of domination...
...intellectual endeavors, there remains in Neumann's work a unity of design and purpose...
...Essentially Neumann was a critical thinker...
...He now tended to separate legitimate sociological analysis of the class character of the state from theory and program of political action...
...It had an underlying integrated set of coordinated presuppositions with respect to both the impact of the prevailing social structure and the character of political institutions, and the inner contradiction between the rational nature of man and the prevailing social structure...
...From this, his basic political experience, he had drawn a life-long sharp contempt for vacuities and make-believe and a burning interest in ever-renewed analysis of all relevant progressive and regressive factors of history...
...Reviews are not listed in thebibliography appended to the volume under discussion...
...Deepening pessimism in regard to all societal institutions did not, however, stifle the utopian's inquisitively optimistic outlook, eloquent testimonial to Neumann's lifelong avocation as a critical socialist...
...ASSEMBLED IN ONE VOLUME, Neumann's late contribution to the theory of dictatorship—often incisive but as often sketchy and tentative— leave many unresolved difficulties...
...What does this mean other than that modern industrial societies may be reduced to some sort of common political denominator...
...If anxiety starts the process of identification, what then makes the difference between "regressive" and "non-affective" identificaLion...
...While the individual's specific histori...
...And his very last paper in which he examined the ways of affective identification of the mass-molded individual with the totalitarian leader, almost shut the door on any intrinsic transformation of totalitarian societies...
...True, to some extent this gloss, as often with Neumann, has to be seen within the framework of his running criticism of the European and, more specifically, German Social Democrats' propensity to consider the political victory of the labor movement as a necessary consequence of its economic advance...
...1957...
...Political Quarterly, vol...
...He moved with equal facility in contemporary and historical fields...
...The effective combination of the facts of a pluralist society, of which he was keenly aware, with the requirements of sovereignty baffled his ingenuity and resources...
...His late writings no less than his early ones are impregnated with the belief in the rational propensities of man, implying the feasibility and urgency of a cooperative society to replace the one predicated on competition, but only superficially competitive and easily yielding to totalitarian regimentation...
...In his unfinished essay, "Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship," in which a typology is undertaken, he asserts that the individual today experiences democracy only vicariously...
...His views, developed at an early date and consistently upheld, as to the urgency of protecting individual rights and the problematic chances of resistance, became more pertinent and symptomatic...
...Yet, the bulk of articles and papers collected in this volume were written in the decade after the appearalice of his main contribution to political science, Behemoth...
...In terms of political theory it contended that the Nazi state, lacking a coherent government doctrine, was not an integrated state but rather an agglomeration of four separate totalitarian bodies, communicating with each other on an ad hoc basis...
...While substantive rationality remained its piece de resistance and fundamental yardstick, a new element was added later in that heightened awareness of the responsibility of executive leadership was stipulated as a necessary counterpart to legitimate and called for rank-and-file pressure...
...There is an inherent logic in his position...
...thesis of 1935, excerpts of which are included in a recent volume,* bears witness to that as much as do his later works...
...Neumann's skepticism as to the effectiveness of institutional devices— such as separation of powers, establishment of specific institutions under occupational rule, constitutional safeguards of the right of the individual, or the supposedly decentralizing effect of federalism—clearly increased over the last years...
...However, rationality of man and society was retained as a postulate even though dethroned as a key to man's present behavior...
...The road that leads from mass democracy to totalitarian dictatorship is not necessarily a one-way street precluding every reverse development but the one unleashed by war and military occupation...
...Still regarding the economic development as a major genetic factor in the rise of power structures, he had become more and more preoccupied with the possibility and eventual effects of a divorce between socio-economic and political power, termed in one of his last addresses "domination of politics over economics...
...Despite repeated methodological shifts and the inconclusiveness of his last...
...He made an illustrative case of the interventionist foreign policy of the 19th century liberal state, mistaken for a mere "nightwatchman...
...In contrast to the theory of dictatorship Neumann's picture of what would constitute a desirable political system suffered but slight retouch throughout the years...
...In this endeavor inevitable conflicts arise from the accelerated process of political alienation and what Neumann chides as the "Epicurean" attitude, i.e., bastardization of political patterns due to a purely externalized concept of the function of public order...
...He called on history and— less effectively—on theory to emphasize the importance of this new approach...
...303 pp...
...In spite of the vast vistas it offered on numberless intellectual and social landscapes Behemoth had a clearcut focus...
...Beyond this he did not extend the sphere of man's inalienable rights...
...In the theorist's peregrinations between Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx—with Montesquieu assigned a less conspicuous place—his own experience on two continents increased his penchant for Hobbesian skepticism...
...Never given to caution in formulating harsh political judgment, Neumann displayed everincreasing reserve in subscribing to an all-embracing social and political theory...
...In both thought and construction Neumann's late writings show a certain unevenness...
...His London Ph.D...
...Still refusing to endorse guarantees for acquired positions, he insisted that broad channels be kept open for institutional changes aimed at maximizing freedom...
...Neumann had served his political apprenticeship with the inert unions and the hapless Social Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic...
...The book had emphasized the economic causes for the rise of National Socialism and, 0 The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, Essays in Political and Legal Theo , by Franz Neumann...
...Neumann certainly did not expect totalitarian systems of domination—even though some appeared as loosely knit or lacking in basic features of an integrated state—to break down by the weight of their own monstrosity...
...THIS DIM VIEW of the individual's protection in present-day society is part and parcel of Neumann's quest for a rational organization of the state...
...But what this common structural element is Neumann has left unexplored...
...The bulk of the papers now re-issued, while extending the scope of inquiry to a variety of present day institutions and problems pick up the themes treated in Behemoth—though at times with significant variations...
...There is more to this than the umbilical cord of the educational dictatorship, which Lenin's heirs cut when they perverted the initially envisaged goals of their society...
...This work, translated into many languages, though ironically enough not into German, still—a decade and a half after its first appearance and after a deluge of material on Nazi Germany—offers the most meaningful explanation of the German scene in the 1930's...
...Had he lived, would Neumann have succeeded in integrating the various strands and phases of his thinking...
...cal experience may vary from country to country, the social processes as determinants of his atttitude are increasingly uniform...
...By the late 1940's Neumann had grown critical of his previous assumptions on the nature of social relations...
...He could not help being concerned with the implications of the shift in emphasis manifest in his teaching and writing: If there were no inherent societal laws charging the development of totalitarian societies, how could domination of totalitarian societies, how could domination of totalitarian politics ever be overthrown without conjuring the specter of foreign war and intervention...
...Although many of the data not accessible in the Third Reich's lifetime might have been interpreted in support of Behemoth's thesis, Neumann no longer seemed to assign to them a like order or significance...
...The former Neumann assigns to a totalitarian leader cult, the latter to the salutary integration into the institutions of a pluralist society...
...But beyond this narrow point it highlights another facet of Neumann's thought, stressed particularly in his later writings...
...moreover, showed how capitalist relationships of production, either openly or subterraneously, continued to play a major part in the operations of the monopolistic German command economy...
...Some novel accents in the latest of Neumann's writings disclose a strong intellectual urge to reunite scholarly analysis with an appeal to political action...
...Among professional political scientists the late Franz Neumann easily took a position hors cadre...
...If he inclined towards generalizations, he always tried to buttress them up from his rich store of historical knowledge...
...64,1949, p. 127...
...He was certain that natural law was not enough to concretize the right to resist power...
...But does escape into the superficially controlled anonymity of these mass organizations not have the same effect which privatization has in Western democracies...
...Where previously there had been an element of doctrinal certainty, the identical syndrome now—even if presented in some form of sociological generalization— appears as a cluster of so many empirical relationships reserved for further investigation...
...Neumann's typology of dictatorship, in which the Nazi dictatorship is linked with the regime of Sparta by the common element of fear, does not seem sufficiently geared to social structures to encompass differentiations rooted in modern industrial society...
...As a political thinker Neumann was not an innovator...
Vol. 4 • September 1957 • No. 4
