Franz Leopold Neumann - Biography

Political scientist, born in Katowice, Upper Silesia (now Poland). He escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and emigrated to New York in 1936. He served as an adviser to the State Department during World War 2 and taught at Columbia University (1947–54). His controversial analysis, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942), used Marxist analysis to demonstrate how Nazism ultimately served to strengthen capitalism.

Franz Leopold Neumann (May 23, 1900 – September 2, 1954 in Visp) was a German left-liberal political activist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best-known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism.

Biography

Labor Law and Social Democracy

As a student Neumann supported the German November revolution of 1918 and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt, where in 1918 he met Leo Lowenthal, a future colleague in the Institute of Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer . At Breslau, Leipzig, Rostock and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment. Throughout the Weimar years, Neumann's political commitment was to the laborist wing of the Social Democratic Party.

In the weeks after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Neumann was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled to England. There he studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, as well as the former Frankfurt sociology professor, Karl Mannheim, and he earned a second doctorate with a political theory study of the rise and fall of the historical epoch of the rule of law. On Laski's recommendation, Neumann was employed by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in 1936, initially as administrator and legal advisor, and later as research associate, although he was never as well established as Frederick Pollock and Theodor Adorno. Neumann played an important part in helping the Institute to secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for its well-known study of anti-Semitism.

American Exile

Neumann achieved his academic reputation among American scholars with the publication of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942. The thesis is that National Socialist rule is a function of continuing struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labor movement and that Nazi Germany consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern political formation oriented to order and predictability. Within this framework, Neumann applied many Marxist tools of analysis to characterize the prime social component in the inner struggle. Until the first months of 1943, Neumann served as part-time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, staffing routine studies of trade patterns. Then Neumann became deputy chief of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration.

Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer worked on numerous projects, including the analysis of political tendencies in Germany. At the end of 1944, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer were involved in preparing materials for use by eventual occupation authorities, including a De-nazification Guide. Neumann was detached from Washington Service for almost a year until September 1945 to assist the head of OSS in preparing for the War Crimes Prosecutions. Just before the beginning of the trials, Neumann returned to Washington, to take up a position on the Central European Desk of the Department of State.

The history of Neumann's wartime service is shadowed by the contention that as yet unpublished materials identify him as the Soviet informant, "Ruff," whose exploits between April of 1943 and late 1944 can be tracked in the Verona intercepts.* The details of "Ruff's" information are not inconsistent with Neumann's likely knowledge, since they deal with political matters, especially among church authorities and within conservative circles, inside Germany and abroad, but the link is not firmly established. The charge is further called into question by the fact that Hede Massing, the friend of Neumann who is listed as the head of the group to which "Ruff" is referred, failed to denounce him after 1947 when she testified openly to her activities, although Neumann continued to enjoy the confidence of key figures in both the State and Defense Departments until the end of his life. In any case, no one has ever suggested that the writings in political theory on which Franz Neumann's late reputation rests are in any way affected by this supposed year of improperly shared political information.

Nuremberg, Berlin, New York

In the service of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal under chief prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson, Neumann was tasked with preparing an analysis of each of the twenty-two Nuremberg defendants, and various Nazi organizations. Donovan initially directed Neumann to examine religious persecution other than against Jews under the Nazi regime. Furthermore: "respect for the principle of religious freedom", continued to be reiterated in various official policy statements of the Nazi regime, and in various "enactments of the National Socialist state, particularly the Concordat of 20 July 1933."

The material on religious persecution is placed in the wider context of how these agencies committed crimes against humanity as an integral part of the Nazi’s master plan, its conspiracy to seize and consolidate ideological control and totalitarian power within Germany by eradicating sources of actual and potential opposition. Neumann's group wrote,

Neumann also took charge of revising the first draft prosecution brief detailing the personal responsibility of Hermann Goering, the most senior defendant. Neumann believed that German war criminals should be tried before German courts according to Weimar law as an important part of the wider de-nazification effort.

Like other disillusioned veterans of the Weimar Social Democratic Party, Neumann hoped for a more radical, unified labor and Socialist movement in the immediate post-war period, but he quickly accepted the view shared among his old party associates in Berlin that the Communists' subservience to the Russians required the Social Democratic Party to pursue an independent course.

In 1948 Neuman became a professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and helped establish the Free University of Berlin. Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the United States, Neumann was highly regarded at Columbia University and he played a prominent part in attempts by the Rockefeller Foundation to strengthen political theory as a component of political science in American universities. He published several seminal articles arising out of his attempts to develop a democratic theory consonant with modern political and social changes. The study of modern dictatorships, he contended, revealed the dangers to democracy arising from the pervasive anxiety incident to modern society and showed the need, first, to approach the problem of power from the positive standpoint he thought implicit in the tradition of Rousseau (not liberal fears), and, second, to recognize that freedom entailed rational knowledge of social realities and a mental sense of empowerment (what the older moral philosophy called 'active virtue'), as well as a sphere of protected personal, social (communications), and political (status activus) rights. As with "Behemoth" the force of Neumann's argument depended as much on the richness and realism of his political diagnoses as on the contestable theses he put forward.

Neumann died in an automobile accident in 1954. Michael Neumann, his younger son, is a well-respected professor of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, a logician as well as a radical political philosopher. of the 1936 doctoral dissertation, 'The Governance of the Rule of Law: an Investigation into the Relationship between the Political Theories, the Legal System, and the Social Background in the Competitive Society,' London School of Economics, 1936 (supervisor: Harold J.