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Political Science and Political Theory: The Heart of the Matter
David Kettler
(Research Professor, Bard College)
When Bent Flyvbjerg raises a call to “re-enchant and empower social science,” 1 he may be
understood, at least in part, to be renewing the demand for a “new political science” 2 that had already
mobilized an earlier generation. Like the members of that cohort, he rightly despairs of the disciplinary
preference for studies that are designed more to display and refine techniques of analysis than to seek
answers to the questions that attend efforts to respond to the political urgencies of the times. Social
1Bent
Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter. Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001) 166.
2Writing
in October 1971 to counter the “confessional literature in which writers presume to identify the Caucus
[for a New Political Science] with their own illusions of a few years ago, in order to implicate it in their
disillusionment,” the second chair of the Caucus for a New Political Science set forth his understanding of the
organization’s purposes in a letter to the third, as follows:
1. To identify the structural bias of American political science as a discipline and to reveal the ways in which
the organization of the profession (departmentally and nationally) protects and fosters that bias [at
minimum, this is a theoretical venture, encouraging work in the politics and sociology of intellectual life; at
maximum, it is also a political venture, challenging the practical supremacy of a dominant ideology];
2. To provide a forum and create a critical audience for theoretical work that deviates from the dominant
ideology;
3. To facilitate resistance against the power which stifles or distorts such work [and such distortion can
proceed as well by creating a self-righteous shrillness or defensiveness as by inducing cowardice];
4. To play an appropriate role vis a vis the various ways in which the discipline collaborates in oppressive
political projects and processes [thus, supporting women’s, Blacks’ and Chicanos’ groupings, opposing the
harnessing of the discipline to the needs of oppressive technology, etc.]
The writer admits that “some of these tasks have [...] pushed the Caucus onto uncertain ground –where rhetoric is
overblown and the importance of [certain] issues is exaggerated,” but he maintains that the tasks are “still worth
while [...] notwithstanding our relative paucity of financial and other political resources.” David Kettler to Christian
Bay, October 21, 1971. Author’s Papers. See also David Kettler, The Vocation of Radical Intellectuals, Politics and
Society I (Autumn, 1970), reprinted in Ira Katznelson et al., ed., The Politics and Society Reader, New York: David
McKay Company, 1974; pp. 333-359. Cp. Alan Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolf,
eds., An End to Political Science. The Caucus Papers, New York: Basic Books, 1970: 288-309.
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scientists in general and political scientists in particular, intoxicated with methodology, are forever
looking where the light of science is deemed to shine brightest, and not where the key objects of value
have been lost. The question was then and the question is now, however, whether the best antidote is, so
to speak, a hair of the dog. Flyvbjerg asks us to set about reversing the situation where social science is
the “loser in the Science Wars.” I am not persuaded that this is a valuable or achievable objective, and I
will argue that those of us who share his larger concerns would do better to “declare victory” and to
withdraw from that theater of operations, which is not of our choosing. When we “bring the boys...and
girls...home,” we will find more than enough to do, as well as excellent models to guide us–including the
talented social science researcher, Bent Flyvbjerg.
The aim of this paper is, first, to indicate briefly some illustrative instances where Flyvbjerg’s
mistaken priority leads him to needless extravagances in transmitting his welcome message that the
social sciences need not be as sterile as their official version appears to be, and, second, to examine a very
different effort to open political science up to larger political questions, focusing on some new findings in
my recent researches in the work of a representative figure and influential teacher from among the
generation of German émigrés of the 1930s, Franz L. Neumann. In the spirit of Flyvbjerg’s emphasis on
the importance of examples and illustrations, I want to cite Neumann’s flawed and unfinished project as
a more useful paradigm for future work.
1. The Unavoidable Specter of Max Weber
Reinhard Laube, a young German historian of social theory, has recently coined an almost
untranslatable but invaluable question to ask about the extensive methodological writings spawned in
supposed refutation of Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” initially in Weimar Germany, but later also
in exile. He asks how much of that literature ends up as an incantational “deproblematization” of the
fundamental disjunction between the validity of disciplined social inquiry and the merits of ethical and
political choices dramatized by Weber, and how much succeeds in a “reproblematization” that improves
2
on Weber’s decisionist decrees.3 Laube cautions that many proclamations of a humanistic “new science,”
which he exemplifies by the most celebrated early rejoinder to Weber, must be judged as rhetorical
evasions.4 Surprisingly, Laube finds promising reproblematization of the antinomy vulgarly summarized
as the distinction between “facts and values,” in the work of Karl Mannheim, at least in the writings
culminating in Ideology and Utopia.5 The crux is the removal of the value decision from Weber’s arbitrary
realm of divinities at war, from whence one or another daemon emanates to determine our individual
choices, to the realm of political education and conflict and to a more self-reflexive understanding of what
we are doing when we bring knowledge to bear on political choice. 6 Yet a reproblematization, as Laube
Reinhard Laube, “Bildung as Reproblematization or Deproblematization: Max Weber, Erich von Kahler and
Helmuth Plessner” in David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, eds., Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of
German Emigre Intellectuals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
3
4The
reference is to Erich Kahler, now largely forgotten, whose aesthetic writings and cultural criticism were
important for a time in Germany, and who also enjoyed a brief vogue in American exile among the literary
public for such writings For the critique of Weber, see excerpts from Erich Kahler, The Vocation of Science in
Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’. (London: Unwin
Hyman,1989). For a brief English-language treatment of main themes in Kahler’s work by the author of the
standard German critical study, see Gerhard Lauer, “Watermarks of the Kingdom. Erich Kahler in Exile,” in
David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, eds., Exile. Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of the German Intellectual
Emigrants. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005)
5Reinhard
Laube, Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004); see
also Peter Breiner, “Translating Max Weber. Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political Science,” European Journal
of Political Theory, 3.2 (April, 2004) 133-150. Cp. David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of
Liberalism (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers 1995) and Colin Loader and David Kettler, Karl
Mannheim’s Sociology as Political Education (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers 2002).
6Cp.
John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory. The Genealogy of an American Vocation. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993) and most recently, idem., “Reading Max Weber. Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin,” European
Journal of Political Theory, 3. 2 (April 2004) 151-166.
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sees it, will not attempt to conjure away Weber’s distinction which is so consistent with the daily
experience of self-critical practicing researchers into social and political life, and so indispensable to their
actual attempts to derive use from the studies of others. The task is to redefine the interconnection
without negating the tension. In jargon, one might speak of a two-term rather than three-term dialectic.
The question about “deproblematization” applies here because Flyvbjerg’s provocative choice of
“re-enchantment” as a key term expressly lines him up against Weber’s thesis about rationalization and
the “disenchantment” of the world.
His comfortable insistence on “substantive rationality,”
furthermore, taken in the slightly off-center sense of the Weberian concept first propounded in Karl
Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, combines strangely with the invocations of
Nietzsche and Foucault, neither of whom could possibly grant him the term. Yet the importance of these
authors to him makes it clear that he does not mean “substantive rationality” in the way that might
otherwise be suggested by his frequent citations of Aristotle. He is not inviting us to return to the faith in
the “natural” grounding of ethical judgments, although Aristotelians old and new would insist that the
phronesis [practical judgment] which Flyvbjerg offers us as key concept, makes sense only as a practical
approximation, appropriate to circumstances, of such “natural right,” to borrow the formulation of the
well established and politically efficacious contemporary school of Leo Strauss, which Flyvbjerg is
certainly not inviting us to emulate.
As a reader whose relationship to Aristotle is pretty well bounded by the familiarity that comes
with teaching the canonic texts in undergraduate courses over the years, I am nevertheless made restive
by Flybjerg’s undertaking to “empower” Aristotle in a chapter full of references to Foucault and
Nietzsche, but none to Aristotle’s Politics or Rhetoric, not to speak of his comparative constitutions project,
of which we have only the Constitution of Athens, which do not leave much doubt about Aristotle’s
awareness of power or the political “performative” aspects of political discourse, including the
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interpretation of concepts as fundamental as justice.7 Flyvbjerg is too impatient to work out the subtle
distinctions between the dramatizations of power in the more recent models and Aristotle’s concept of
power. Much the same can be said with reference to his treatment of Habermas. When Habermas lays
out his framework for analyzing concrete political situations, he offers complex models of two
counterworking processes of power, one “communicative” and ethical and the other “administrative”
and instrumental. “How these two processes,the spontaneous formation of opinion in autonomous
publics, and the organized procurement of mass loyalty, interpenetrate one another, ” Habermas writes,
“and who overpowers whom, is an empirical question.” 8 Habermas is a crafty writer in his less technical
papers, who knows precisely what he is doing when he surreptitiously quotes Lenin’s “Kto-Kogo?” [Who
whom?], and he can hardly be suspected of the naivety about power that Flyvbjerg professes to find in
his writings. In fact, it is arguable that what Habermas writes in this brief passage taken from a piece of
occasional writing epitomizes what I would call a “reproblematization” of Weber–who is hardly powerblind– which is of course Habermas’ primary project, at least since The Structure of Communicative Action.
As in his dealings with Aristotle, the point is that Flyvbjerg is not interested in the structures that
give meaning in philosophical contexts to the elements that he extracts from philosophical writers in
order to give expression to his own largely pragmatic readings of the texts. 9 He does not have time for
7Book
V of the Politics is full of such observations. A no less fateful aporia in Flyvbjerg’s reading of Aristotle is
neglect of the comparative method, which conditions Aristotle’s treatment of concrete situations.
Jürgen Habermas, “Ist der Herzschlag der Revolution zum Stillstand gekommen? Volkssouveränität als
Verfahren. Ein normativer Begriff der Öffentlichkeit?,” [Has the Heartbeat of the Revolution Come to a Stop?
Popular Sovereignty as Procedure. A Normative Concept of the Public?], Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg,
Die Ideen von 1789 in der deutschen Rezeption. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989)
8
9A
classic formulation and exemplification of method, dealing with materials of special interest to political
theorists, is Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
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the scholarship required by a serious philosophic reconstruction and critique because he has his own,
much more pressing social science work to do. But philosophy is a demanding autonomous discipline
with its own claims to respect; the self-reflection of critical intellectuals in the social sciences is best served
by steady attention to what other working social scientists say and do in close conjunction with their
actual studies. Mediations between the two domains take varied forms. Obviously, there will be
learning from and bargaining with philosophical writers, but judgments will be more commonly made
good by social science results than by improvised “refutations” of philosophical writers or definitive
programmatic claims.
Such a narrowing of ambitions would also protect against the sort of risible disproportion I find,
for example, in Flyvbjerg’s invocations of Nietzsche as patron saint while promoting such exquisitely
modest and thoroughly admirable undertakings as his exemplary social science interventions in the
shaping of Aalborg’s automobile-free city center. Nietzsche is reported to have fed horses on the street in
his later years, but he is not known to have cared much about bicyclists, not even the Danish compatriots
of Georg Brandes, his first literary admirer. I do not mean to mock a serious and talented colleague,
especially since an endemic confusion about “theoretical” work and the uses of deeply interesting
thinkers like Nietzsche and Marx and the rest puts us all sometimes in such false positions. Surprisingly
little thought has been given, in fact, to such vital operations as “learning from” and “negotiating with,”
when it comes to encounters on the way to and from our own studies. What does seem clear is that these
are properly constructive and even opportunistic relationships, too selective and decontextualized to
bestow leverage for legitimate critique and evaluation. At the limit, the texts one finds suggestive are
important mostly from the standpoint of biography. These are not the armaments for “science wars.”
Reading Flyvbjerg not as combatant but as social inquirer, we will focus more on his sample
studies than his program. And if we look at Flybjerg’s actual procedure in his Aalborg study in this way,
we find, first, that the dual emphases on competing “rationalities” and the dynamics of power/resistance
are both eminently useful–and thoroughly familiar from the work of Weber and his school. To take an
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old example, consider Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph E. Bensman’s Small Town in Mass Society (1958) or
(even) Robert Dahl’s study of power in New Haven. 10 Admittedly, they do not, as far as appears, rely on
archival sources, but they do depend on interviews and newspaper files, and that difference cannot make
the difference. Flyvberg speaks of “narrative,” but his narrative turns at a critical point on the
interpretation of some survey research, and presumably the validity of that research is subject to all the
“scientistic” criteria of sampling, reliability, and interviewer bias, so that one cannot read a blanket
prohibition against exact methods or detailed analysis into Flyvbjerg’s example. The value-bearing
(Weber speaks of Wertbezogenheit) of both earlier examples is undeniable; they are not value-indifferent.
What is admittedly missing in the older studies, in comparison to Flyvberg’s example, is the participantobserver role that enabled Flyvbjerg to experience his social science contribution as making an immediate
difference in a context of collective problem solving.11 But that comparatively direct mode of
“empowerment” would be quite impossible in a study, say, about the effects of some of the processes
more or less happily comprehended as globalization on the terms of democratic political discourse,
grounded as the latter are in bounded polities and their citizens. And any conception of social science
that precludes such inquiries, as it seems to me, cannot possibly matter. Flyvbjerg’s query “what’s going
on?” must be open to an answer that addresses what the young John Stuart Mill called the “Spirit of the
Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). For a recent reappraisal of the political
import of Dahl’s work by Ira Katznelson, one of the most influential young political scientists close to the Caucus
for a New Political Science in 1970, when he founded Politics and Society in 1970 with the support of the
organization, see Desolation and Enlightenment. Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the
Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
10
The older literature on the so-called theory-practice problem is of course vast. Some boundary markers of the
field within which one might situate Flyvbjerg might be John Dewey’s The Problem and Its Problems and Georg
Lukács’ History and Class-Consciousness. Mannheim subtitled the core essay of Ideology and Utopia, “The Problem
of Theory and Practice.” And Habermas became Habermas, so to speak, with his book on Theory and Practice.
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Age” and what Karl Mannheim called a “Diagnosis of our Time,” however contestable any conscientious
answer to such questions may be, now that we have no authoritative philosophy of history to guide us.
For such wider studies to “matter,” in Flyvbjerg’s practical sense, moreover, there would have to
be publics and constituencies willing and able to respond to the readings, and the effects would be at best
diffuse and long-term. From Mill to Mannheim to Habermas, to stay with figures already cited, the
problem of constituting such publics has been an essential component of much intellectual effort. And
the continued relevance of that issue brings us back to the world of the complex interplay between
political science and political theory, if the latter is modestly understood in its character as contested
venue of intellectual orientation and political education, constantly having to find ways of separating
itself from ideology in the pejorative sense, which aims to occupy the same niche. The exchanges with
empirical political science are decisive to this end, and the integrity of those exchanges depends on
mutual recognition of separateness and distance, just as Max Weber proposed. Yet that it does not
follow that “values” are a matter for arbitrary decision alone, or that reasoning about political matters is
standardized on a linear means-ends ratio. The experimenting with modes of complementarity–what
was earlier called the “reproblematization” of the Weberian disjunction– is best observed and assessed in
encounters with the actual intellectual projects enacting one or another strategy.
2. Franz L. Neumann’s Political Studies Project, 1946-1954.
In his renowned essay on “The Adventure,” Georg Simmel remarks that there is something
unseemly in the spectacle of an older person launching forth on the timeless intensity, improvization and
all-or-nothing risks of the adventure; historical continuity is the medium appropriate to age.12 Flybjerg’s
12Georg
Simmel, “The Adventure,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Georg Simmel, 1858-1918 (Columbus OH: Ohio State
University Press, 1959) 243-258, at 254.
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juxtapositions of unlikely intellectual mentors is nothing if not adventurous. To illustrate an alternative
strategy, I shall be satisfied to recall a more cautious thinker, Franz L. Neumann (1900-1954).13 A Social
Democratic labor lawyer in Weimar Germany and a graduate of the London School of Economics under
Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim in the first years of his exile, Neumann was author not only of the
seminal Behemoth, which offered a model for understanding Nazi Germany no less influential and
generative, in its earnest way, than Hannah Arendt’s spectacular Origins,14 but also, somewhat later, of an
instructive project for interrelating the work conventionally divided between political theory and
empirical political science. The latter undertaking can be best understood if his writings of the post-war
years are read in the context of his exchanges with colleagues, not least in conjunction with his extensive
dealings with foundations. Some reflection on his design may effectively complement, especially for
political studies, the attempts in this volume to extract and extrapolate the insights that are doubtless
To declare a rather massive interest, I must say, first, that Neumann was my teacher at Columbia, and that I
have been intermittently puzzling over his political theory/political science project since my very first published
paper, a brief review in Dissent of his posthumously published essays (“Dilemmas of Radicalism,” Autumn 1957.
386-392). My recent book of articles, most of them dealing with more recent aspects of his special topics,
Domestic Regimes, Rule of Law, and Democratic Social Change (Berlin: Galda & Wilch, 2001), is dedicated to him; and
his claims about the German Social Science Emigration of the 1930s, Franz L. Neumann, “The Social Sciences”, in
The Cultural Migration. The European Scholar in America. Franz L. Neumann et al. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1953): 4-26) served as primary challenge to my recent “Contested Legacies” project on
German intellectuals in exile. For a brief programmatic statement, see David Kettler, ed., Contested Legacies: The
German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the US and UK, 1933-1945 (Berlin: Galda & Wilch, 2002).
None of these treatments, it should be added, is uncritical; my interest is not in hagiography. Recent
publications on Neumann include: Peter Intelmann, Franz L. Neumann. Chancen und Dilemmas des politischen
Reformismus. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996); William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception. The
Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Joachim Perels (ed.), Recht. Demokratie und
Kapitalismus: Aktualität und Probleme der Theorie Franz L. Neumanns. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984); Mattias Iser and
David Strecker (eds.), Kritische Theorie der Politik. Franz L. Neumann--eine Bilanz. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002);
Mattias Iser and David Strecker, eds., “Franz L. Neumann: Power, Constitution, Critique,” Constellations 10:2
(June 2003).
13
Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1942, 19442). Cp. Alfons Söllner, “Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original
Context,” European Journal of Political Theory 3. 2 (April 2004) 219-238.
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present in Flybjerg’s bold work.
A reflection on Neumann seems an appropriate bit of history, above all, because he strongly
opposed his own time’s versions of the present-day divorce between “political theory” and “empirical
political science,” which I consider to be the heart of the matter. Political theorists today are largely
satisfied to be intellectual historians, epistemological explorers, or moral philosophers, often displaying
extraordinary talent and virtuosity in these activities. Political science, for its part, puts the subject matter
that the discipline used to class as political theory under the heading of ideology, and it admits theory, in
the analytical sense of the term, only in one or another of the modes legitimated by the science which is
characterized as empirical, although it actually leaves room for a good deal of rationalist constructivism.
Neumann’s program was not a “refutation” of such “political theory” or “political science,” insofar as he
could anticipate them fifty years ago, but a rejection of the categorical separation between the domains
and the claims of either to exclusivity. “Empirical” work represented a continuum from narrative history
to statistical analysis: it was all of intellectual importance, but also in need of contextualizing by a
“theoretical” statement of questions and problems. The political theorists of the “canon” and others
provide vital intellectual resources, but only insofar as engagement with their work helps contemporary
thinkers to enrich their understanding of political relations and possibilities, past and present.
This requires a construction of the theories in conjunction with an account of the factual evidence
to which it is meant to apply, with the value assessed by reference to the theories’ worth as practical
guide to judgment and conduct, given human aspirations to freedom. For Neumann, this implied
indifference to precisely the structural features of theories that philosophers quite properly care about,
which he dismissed as metaphysics in the pejorative sense. The models for his concept of theory appear
to be the justificatory and organizing theories of law in the approach that Neumann learned from Hugo
Sinzheimer and practiced as a labor lawyer in the Weimar years, where theory must conjoin but cannot
fully synthesize the formal qualities of legality (which comprehend its core normative worth as well) with
a sociological apprehension of the changing realities to which the law applies. 15 Such complementarities
Already in his 1923 dissertation, Neumann shifts the concept of dialectics, which he values as a formal frame
for empirical study, towards a two-term process He quotes the Marxistic sociologist, Max Adler, on the familiar
triad, but he qualifies his agreement by emphasizing the co-positing of negation with thesis, so that the synthesis
is understood as a new conflict-ridden but more inclusive thesis rather than as a pacifying unification. This shift
is confirmed in his terminology, where he prefers the term “antagonism” to comprehend what the method of
dialectics uncovers when applied to social happenings. Franz L. Neumann, Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung zu
15
10
between jointly relevant but incompatible models of understanding human conduct have been praised as
asserting “the value of human action in time–which is to say, of
einer Untersuchung ueber das Verhaeltnis von Staat und Strafe, Frankfurt, Rechtswiss. Diss. von 5. Juni 1923
(typescript), 114 p. (University Library, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt) An account of
Neumann’s position is rendered somewhat uncertain by his lawyer’s habits of arguing briefs or offering
negotiation gambits. Cp. Neumann’s interventions in the 1941 “Debate about the methods of the social sciences, and
especially about the conception social scientific method represented by the Institute [of Social Research,” where he
implicitly accepts the philosophically ambitious version of neo-Marxism put forward by Horkheimer, Adorno
and the others, but represents the difficulties in the way of overcoming Americans’ insistence on empirical
verification, pressing the point that any explanation of their position “must not be Marxistic” and concluding, “It
is not a question of working out our own method but only ‘how do I put it to these innocents.’” Protocol. Max
Horkheimer Archive IX.214. January 17, 1941. This is not the place to work out details of Neumann’s relations
with the so-called Frankfurt School. Recent publications on Neumann include: Peter Intelmann, Franz L.
Neumann. Chancen und Dilemmas des politischen Reformismus. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996); William E.
Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception. The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994); Joachim Perels (ed.), Recht, Demokratie und Kapitalismus: Aktualität und Probleme der Theorie Franz L.
Neumanns. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984); Mattias Iser and David Strecker (eds.), Kritische Theorie der Politik. Franz
L. Neumann--eine Bilanz. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002); Mattias Iser and David Strecker, eds., “Franz L. Neumann:
Power, Constitution, Critique,” Constellations 10:2 (June 2003). My own conclusion is that his alignment with the
heads of the Institute was based on negotiated terms, which allowed him a great deal of autonomy in theory.
Cp. David Kettler, “Negotiating Exile: Franz Neumann as Political Scientist,” in David Kettler and Gerhard
Lauer, eds., Exile, Science, Bildung: The Contested Legacies of the German Emigre Intellectuals. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
11
history, of drama.16” Political action is the common ground–the shared reference point– between the two
modes of thinking, but it cannot be exhaustively comprehended by either.
In a memorial delivered, as dictated by convention, by the Head of his Columbia department to
the assembled council of the Faculty of Political Science soon after Neumann’s death, but written in quite
an unconventional, almost confrontational manner by Neumann’s closest friend, Herbert Marcuse, it is
said of him that he “was a scholar for whom political science was closely linked to political action” and
that “theory was for him not abstract speculation, not a digest of various opinions on state, government,
etc., but a necessary guide and precondition for political action.” His lifelong cause, according to the
friend who knew best how he would want to be remembered, even in this academic setting, was to
reverse the Weimar failure of social democracy, and his most pressing concern was the condition of his
time. Referring to the situation in both Germany and the United States in 1954, Marcuse claims, “He
became ever more apprehensive of the intensified anti-democratic and neo-fascist trends the world over.
He did not compromise; he did not recant.” The motif of the talk was set at the outset, when it was stated
as a puzzle that Neumann’s last work should have addressed “Anxiety in Politics,” since “he had always
rejected the interpretation of politics in psychological terms.” The conclusion returns to the puzzle,
striking a political tone that lent urgency to what might otherwise have appeared as a commonplace:
The “Anxiety in Politics” came to be his last word, it was not an escape into psychology.
The title calls reality by its name; it epitomizes the political situation of man in
contemporary society. The traditional notions of political science are here absorbed into
Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 183-184. Since Burckhardt
was also the author long ago of two vigorous polemics in the American Political Science Review against the abuse of
literary materials for the use of political theory by Harry V. Jaffa and Alan Bloom, he cannot be cited in the present
context without some trepidation. It was in great literary works, not political studies, that Burckhardt himself saw
this pattern play out.
16
12
the overriding category – anxiety. The category does not seem to be alien and extraneous
to political science today.17
Neumann’s legacy, in my view, does not consist of his particular political convictions or his
distinctive diagnosis of his time, but of his placing the starting point and endpoint of the two distinct
aspects of political study in the practical domain of political action, understood not as a locus for self
enclosed projects, however worthy, but as the arena where system-related, long-term conflicts are
adjusted or fought out. Specific aims, bargained settlements, and wins or losses in that political domain
were understood in strategic perspective, as moments in unending campaigns by collective and socially
embedded actors; and both political theory and empirical political science had to be good enough, critical
and remote from ideological truisms, to provide clarification and orientation.
There is always
something to be done: “No freedom without political activity,” is the formula Marcuse ascribed to him, in
the memorial. But there is no assurance that situations rightly understood and aims rightly reflected will
endorse dramatic measures likely to bear large consequences in the short run.
In the address on “Politics and Anxiety” cited by Marcuse, for example, Neumann starts with a
concept of alienation derived from Schiller, Hegel and Marx, links alienation to anxiety with the help of
Freud’s suggestions about mass-psychology and the identification with leaders, and emphasizes the
heightening of these effects through an institutionalization of anxiety by means of the pervasive spread of
conspiracy theories and measures of terror. These continuing trends, he contends in 1954, make “the
world [...] more susceptible to the growth of regressive mass movements,” if also in modes different from
the 1930s. He asks whether the state or education can be relied upon to counteract these dangers, and
answers both questions with quotations from Schiller, discrediting both formulas, to all appearances,
since both agencies are implicated in the “barbarous civil polity”; but Neumann concludes nevertheless
17
Minutes of Political Science Faculty, April 15, 1955, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University.
13
that “for us as citizens of the university and of the state,” there nevertheless remains only “the dual
offensive on anxiety and for liberty: that of education and that of politics.” 18
“Anxiety and Politics” was presented at a ceremonial occasion at the Free University of Berlin, of
which Marcuse credited him with being “the chief architect.” What is important in the present context
about Neumann’s efforts on behalf of the Free University is, first, that they were a prime locus of political
activity for him, involving not only the municipal government and American military authorities but also
the principal foundations whose conduct of American cultural policies was closely coordinated with
public agencies.19 Second, Neumann did what he could to prevent the Free University from becoming
18Franz
Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” The Democratic and the Authoritarian State,” (Glencoe IL: The Free Press,
1957) 270-303, at 294. The Schiller references are to the Letters Concerning Aesthetic Education. Neumann does
allow for the possibility of an “individual solution–such as love,” whose availabilty is however accidental and
uncertain. Putting aside the personal considerations that may have led to this reference at that time in his life,
the reference corresponds to his remarks on Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters in his essay on Montesquieu, in
idem.,. 96-148, at 102-104. For an extension of Neumann’s analysis, cp. David Kettler, "Montesquieu on Love:
Notes on the Persian Letters," American Political Science Review LVIII(September, 1964), pp. 658-661.
19Neumann’s
activities on behalf of the Free University in 1951 and the interweaving of private and public agencies
can be especially well followed in the archival records of the Ford Foundation at FF Reel 489, Grant 51-41. .
The records open with a letter from John J. McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany to his friend, Paul
Hoffman, formerly Director of the European Cooperation Administration, which administered the Marshall
Plan, and at the time President of the Ford Foundation, and it ends with an award of $1, 309, 500 to the Rector of
the Free University. Neumann is author of the report to the State Department on the Free University–his third–
that McCloy sends to Hoffman, and he is also the advocate who accompanies the Free University Rector during
his visit to the Ford Foundation. While Ford Foundation staff (having consulted with McCloy, CIA, the
appropriate State Department desk, and George Kennan) speak of the Free University as “an important
contribution to the cold war and to the strengthening of democratic influences within Germany,” Neumann
allows that “that the problem of the FU is not simply an academic, but that it is far more a political problem
[because] our prestige and reputation in Berlin are to a considerable degree dependent upon the success or
failure of the Free University”; but he emphasizes the opportunity of breaking with the obsolete practices of
West German universities, especially in political studies, and notes value of preventing Catholic influence by
keeping the university free of federal funding (John B. Howard (FF),Memo of FLN visit: FF Reel 489, Grant 51-41,
Section 2).
14
simply an instrument of anti-Communist policy, although its beginnings and original support depended
on the opposition to developments at Humboldt University in the East. This is documented more by his
silences than by express arguments, as well as by his vigorous advocacy against inclusion of faculty
whose complicity in the cultural policies of the Third Reich were garbed as anti-Communism. And third,
and most important in the present context, one of his principal aims was to integrate political studies at
the Free University with the work of the Hochschule für Politik, a site of important involvement for him
already during the Weimar years and the center for a conception of “political education” (politische
Bildung) that both embodied and embedded a way of doing social science.
Nothwithstanding intellectual differences between Franz Neumann and Albert Salomon, who
spoke for the Hochschule in the late Weimar years, differences that were excerbated in exile, and
notwithstanding the passage of time and change in political contexts, Neumann can be understood to
have shared the assumptions and aims of the Hochschule as they were already laid out by Salomon in
1930. Writing as director of the school’s domestic program, Salomon, left no doubt, first, that the
political Bildung the school sought to provide was intended to replace the older cultivational model in its
effects on both individual development and integrative political orientation, and, second, that the
intellectual medium of political cultivation was above all political sociology, with its key elements
derived from Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. Political sociology contributes to political Bildung, not
because it guarantees meanings for political orientation, as Catholicism and the major ideologies purport
to do, according to Salomon, but because of its effects on the ways in which individuals hold the partisan
political commitments that first open them to political schooling. The sociological understanding of the
life-forms of politics makes for a sophisticated and subtle reading of the layered forces operative in
political life, an understanding that in itself effectively precludes doctrinaire arbitrariness, and it imparts
a dynamic understanding of one’s own standpoint and thus of the ramifications of one’s actions for the
constellation as a whole. The political person knows what s/he is doing. Salomon contends that this
15
requires a breaking down of the “barricaded enclosures” set up by political parties, an isolation oddly
reinforced, in his view, by historical German mental habits of self-satisfied inwardness or utopianism.
Political Bildung ultimately hopes to foster a demanding and perpetually unsettled conscience. 20 For
Neumann, as for Salomon, the institutionalization of political education, the shape of political inquiry,
and the logic of political action are interlinked, although each of the three constituents has its own
integral norms and none is merely instrumental to the others. To turn from the logical categories of twoterm dialectics and complementarity to a more strictly political simile, Neumann’s conception of political
studies resembles a constitution, understood as a dynamic conjunction of formal and political elements. 21
Such a reconstitution of political studies is a largely lost but retrievable legacy from Neumann and, as Ira
Katznelson has recently argued, from the generation of American academics most directly responsive to
the impetus of the emigre intellectuals of the 1930s.22 The constitutional simile is especially applicable
because Neumann, like Flybjerg, pushed for the reconceptualization of two categories that a political
20Albert
Salomon,“ Innenpolitische Bildung,” in Ernst Jäckh, Politik als Wissenschaft. Zehn Jahre Deutsche
Hochschule für Politik (Berlin: Hermann Reckendorf, 1931), 94-110. For a brief introduction to this school, where
Neumann taught courses during the Weimar years, see David Kettler, “Political Education for a Polity of
Dissensus: Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber,” European Journal of Political Theory, 1.1. (July 2002), 3151, esp. 35-39. The paragraph above is adapted from this article. In the postwar period, Neumann succeeded in
placing his former law partner and closest Weimar friend, Ernst Fraenkel, in the Hochschule, as well as Arkady
Gurland, a long-time close associate in the Institute for Social Research.
21Cp.
Franz L. Neumann, "The Social Significance of the Basic Laws in the Weimar Constitution," Economy and
Society 10:3 (1981) 329f. See also David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr,"The Reconstitution of Political Life:
The Contemporary Relevance of Karl Mannheim's Political Project,” Polity 20 (Summer, 1988) 4: 623-647.
Neumann’s associate, Ernst Fraenkel, carried this “dialectical” conception forward in the subsequent years of the
Bonn Republic. See literature cited in David Kettler, “‘Weimar and Labor’ as Legacy: Ernst Fraenkel, Otto KahnFreund, and Franz L. Neumann”, Helga Schreckenberger, ed., Die Alchemie des Exils. Exil als schöpferischer
Impuls.(Vienna: Edition Praesens 2005), especially articles by Hubertus Buchstein and Alfons Soellner.
22Katznelson,
Enlightenment and Despair [note 10].
16
inquiry he considered as either too idealistic in its rendering of normative dimensions or too reductionist
in its realism, and it is precisely the unresolved conjunction of political ideals and power that Max Weber
puts at the center of constitutional law.
Neumann announced these dual themes in one of his first sustained encounters with American
political scientists, the Columbia University Seminar on “The State” during the academic year, 1946-1947,
when Neumann was an adjunct professor in the School of International Relations. 23 The subject under
discussion was bureaucracy, taken up by the group as a theoretical problem, after two years of
descriptive historical treatments involving specialists in Egyptology, Greek and Roman Classics, and
Medieval History. At the beginning of the new academic year, in October, 1946, however, Robert K.
Merton is applauded by Karl Wittfogel and Arthur MacMahon when he opens the proceedings with the
remark that “we have had no clear statement of problems in two years; we didn’t formulate the question
why we are concerned with aspects of bureaucracy.”24 Neumann is asked for his views, as a new member
with “individual experience in this field.” Wittfogel and Merton had spoken to the issue first. Wittfogel
wanted a focus on the social structural conditions under which bureaucracies are strong or weak, as well
as their inner power relations, while Merton proposed a focus on the “factors which tend to limit
bureaucratic power,” in the wider context of a typology of bureaucracies. Neumann’s remarks, his first
recorded intervention in the seminar, are completely in character, responding openly to the ideological
motifs implicitly present in the remarks of the others, not to denounce them but to bring them expressly
The minutes of the University Seminars are archived in the University Seminars Office at Columbia. The
records of the University Seminar on the State are incomplete, with a gap between 1947 and 1954. Since Robert
K. Merton was secretary during those years, there is some hope that the missing records will turn up in his
papers, when they are sorted..
23
24
[Columbia] University Seminar 401-402 (1946-1947) THE STATE. First Meeting. October 4, 1946: 1
17
into discussion:
That bureaucracy and democracy are incompatible is untrue. Democracy would then be
procedural. Might not our approach be to inquire where the locus of power is in the
modern state. Is it in the bureaucracy? Is it outside the government? [....] We should
analyze bureaucracy, and the external conditions making bureaucracy rule in our social
process. Militarization has taken place in the human relations of society; external
conditions have become so powerful that they may make democracy a sham and
bureaucracy the power.25
Having injected this political urgency into the discussion, Neumann made it clear that he did not mean
by this to replace analysis with prophecies of doom. In fact, he added immediately that such a
development was not a realistic threat in the United States, since there was not really a bureaucracy in
that country, in the sense of a cohesive social formation capable of exercising power, but only a “civil
service.”
In the course of the eight meetings of the semester, Neumann built an argument against a
conflation of the functional and socio-historical (or “institutional”) aspects of bureaucracy, which he
claimed to find in Max Weber, and against the erroneous assumption that a growth of bureaucracy in
either of those senses necessarily implied an increase in bureaucratic power. Rather than assuming that
the growth of officialdom and the increased need for the functional qualities associated with bureaucracy
opened the door to rule by administrative agents of the ever more complex state, Neumann saw the
accession of bureaucrats to a share of that decision-making on discretionary, contested, and weighty
matters that matter, which he identified with “power” as a puzzling anomaly, given the impossibility of
governing a dynamic society by the established rules inherent in bureaucracy, and thus as a symptom
25
Ibid. 2
18
either of temporary conditions or of pathological malformations of state. When actors within the
institutions of bureaucracy have power, they are not in any case acting bureaucratically. The question is
how the locus of power came to such an unexpected place. 26 His first assumption was always that power
in the modern state, strictly speaking, would be exercised by other actors, whether public or private, and
that bureaucracy would be instrumental, restricted to the functions that Weber identified as peculiarly
bureaucratic. The problem of adapting democracy to modern conditions is not addressed by an attack on
bureaucracy, or on the expansion of governmental functions that brings with it a growth of
administration.27 The correct question is about the special circumstances that lead to an exercise of power
by the bureaucracy as institution.
This analysis set him against the other two emigre intellectuals who played a prominent part in
the proceedings, Karl Wittfogel and Gottfried Solomon-Delatour. Wittfogel charges, “Your definition is
your personal definition and competes with others. [...] You have simplified the scope of analysis by
referring to modern society, which is something different from Max Weber’s teachings.” Solomon, in
turn, challenges Neumann: “Do you accept Weber’s modern theory of rationalization in defining
26As
an example of the exceptional cases where bureaucrats exercise discretion and initiatives, Neumann cites
the Weimar agencies charged with imposing arbitrated settlements on the pervasive labor-management
impasses of the late 1920s. He explains the anomaly by the even balance of power between the principal social
actors, and treats it as a critical symptom of impending failure and reaction. Macmahon, interestingly enough,
sees it as a promising precedent instead, implicitly recalling the hopes of Progressive figures like Louis Brandeis
for a maturation of labor relation beyond conflict. Macmahon picks up idea of bureaucracy ruling in the event of
social balance and gives it a positive twist asking “whether out of a situation of balance a genuinely creative way
of handling important questions can arise?” The differences between Neumann and Macmahon on this point
lead to a more basic disagreement about “pluralism” and “corporatism,” which both see turning on the relations
between the state and labor. Neumann says this could be studied in the case of Weimar and Austria, but answers
sharply when Macmahon presses labor example: “That did not happen in Germany or Italy,” abandoning
without a word the more complex position he had shared with his German mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, and
endorsing instead the dramatic shift from a comparable position by his LSE supervisor, Harold Laski.
[Columbia] University Seminar 401-402 (1946-1947) THE STATE. 5th Meeting, November 29, 1946 and 6th
Meeting, December 13, 1946. Cp. literature cited in David Kettler, “Works Community and Workers'
Organizations: A Central Problem in Weimar Labor Law” and “Interest, Ideology, and Culture: From the
Protocols of Peace to Schlesinger v. Quinto” in Domestic Regimes [fn. 13] 23-44, 161-180.
27
[Columbia] University Seminar 401-402 (1946-1947) THE STATE. Fith Meeting, November 29, 1946.
19
bureaucracy?” Neumann’s reply to Wittfogel denies that his distinctions between bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic conduct fail to fit Weber’s expositions of the phenomenon, but his reply to Solomon is “I do
not accept [Weber’s theory] because our society is not foreseeable as Weber says it is; it is even less so
today. [... In any case,] we must distinguish between discretionary and non-discretionary decisions, as
was developed in Locke’s theory.” 28 For Neumann, theories are provisional guides to the reading of
dynamic situations, and the primary objective is always to orient the discussants to a scene for action: the
perspective is that of the actor, not the spectator. The records of the seminar are instructive not because
Neumann is invariably right or clear but precisely because Neumann is always endeavoring to make
social science matter.
Except for the introductory meeting and one meeting devoted to a frequently interrupted report
on bureaucracy in the Soviet Union by a distinguished economist who apologized that he had not studied
the phenomenon at all, the sessions were led by the three German exiles. Wittfogel, who had been a
Communist in Weimar and member of the Institute for Social Research in New York, but had broken
with both, had three sessions to comment on the historical presentations of the preceding two years;
Neumann spoke on bureaucracy in wartime for another three sessions; and Solomon-Delatour, the
intellectual successor of Franz Oppenheimer, whose Frankfurt chair went to Karl Mannheim instead, was
asked to lead the last two meetings by offering his views on the semester’s work. The Americans taking
part were themselves quite influential academic figures, notably Robert K. Merton, on his way to being
one of the foremost sociological theorists of his generation, Walter Gellhorn, a leading writer on
administrative law, and Arthur Macmahon, a very respected figure in American political science, noted
for his work in public administration and American institutions, and President of the American Political
Science Association at the time. The 1946-1947 Columbia University Seminar on the State, in brief, was
28
Ibid. 4-5.
20
an important site for Franz Neumann and his two compatriots in acculturation to bring their competing
macro-theoretical approaches, each possessing political overtones familiar to the competitors from
Weimar debates–notably in conflicting judgments of socialism–, before several prominent representatives
of the older, more narrowly problem-centered as well as the newer, science-building American
intellectual strategies. Neumann made a special impact because he showed that a broader historical and
comparative framework need not detract from the circumstantial citation of urgency, relevance, and
experience (notably his experiences as Weimar lawyer and as bureaucrat in wartime Washington),
qualities of special value to most of his American partners in the seminar.
From a different point of view, Neumann’s strategy in the Columbia seminar can be understood
as an implementation of the overall design developed by the members of Max Horkheimer’s Institute of
Social Research, of which Neumann was an associate during his first years in America and with which he
remained allied, in their attempt to work with and transmit the adaptations of Marxism they called
“critical theory,” without appearing alien or esoteric to American social scientists. In the “Debate about the
methods of the social sciences, and especially about the conception of social scientific method represented by the
Institute [of Social Research], held among the associates in January, 1941, in which N eumann played an
active part, pressing the case for meeting American expectations about empirical verification of claims,
Horkheimer closes the discussion, as follows:
The decisive element we will be unable to reveal--that we actually take science so
seriously, in the end, that the decision of our lives and the turn of our lives as a whole
depend on it--that theory is linked to practice, and that our attitude to practice changes
when our knowledge changes. For us, science retains its practical and political
seriousness. The contrast between the American and the European is that science is
philosophy for us. One can act either on the basis of religious belief or out of theory and
21
knowledge. That's also what it is that unsettles those people so much.29
Certainly the question about bureaucratic power was one of the group’s primary concerns. Horkheimer
uses the theme to illustrate a fundamental difference between themselves and the Americans. If someone
asks whether bureaucracy is the present form of rule, he remarks, we would never think of testing this as
hypothesis but refer question to the context of broader theory that we already possess, to clarify concept
of bureaucracy in relation to class rule and its economic foundations:
We would not make the effort to collect an assortment of new facts, but rather ask
ourselves what does the concept of bureaucracy mean, when it is filled with historical
content [....] Since we have a certain conception of what society is and what its tendencies
are, no problem of method would arise if the question were raised whether bureaucratic
domination could emerge in America.30
That this illustration was not randomly chosen is indicated by the fact that the concept of bureaucracy is
also the subject of the only “scientific question” raised by Neumann in his correspondence with
Horkheimer, during the period of his composition of Behemoth.
Writing in the midst of an exceptionally bitter disagreement between Neumann and
Horkheimer’s co-director, Friedrich Pollock, about Pollock’s article on “State Capitalism,” where
Horkheimer has been attempting to moderate Neumann’s denunciations, Neumann abruptly asks
Horkheimer to comment on the definition of bureaucracy that he proposes to use in Behemoth, perhaps as
an indirect way of reminding Horkheimer that the state capitalism that Pollock projects as an idealtypical possibility presupposes qualities in the bureaucracy that they have all agreed could not be
29
Protocol. Max Horkheimer Archive IX.214. January 17, 1941.
30Ibid.
22
present:
Bureaucratization, as a process operative in public as well as private life, means that
increasingly human relations cease to be direct ones, but become mediated by third
persons who, as public or private servants, more or less securely seated in power,
authoritatively prescribe the behavior of man.” 31
Horkheimer welcomes Neumann’s recognition of bureaucracy as a mediation of alienated forces, beyond
its control, but questions whether his concept does not become “subjectivistic” when it appears to impute
to bureaucrats the quality of authority and the capacity to prescribe conduct. “What takes place in the
heads or meeting rooms [of the bureaucracy], but invariably in the dark, are objective operations, which
have all the less to do with rational formation of will and with spontaneity the more they give the
appearance of reason and planning.” Authority, he continues, is no less under “desperate necessity and
31Max
Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 17: Briefwechsel 1941-1948 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996) 577. Franz
Neumann an Max Horkheimer, Pacific Palisades, [California], August 5, 1941. 124-125. It should be said that
Neumann mailed off this query before he could have received Horkheimer’s rather stern rejoinder to his polemical
letter about Pollock (and, much more cautiously, about Horkheimer’s introduction to the journal containing it), so
that the speculation above about his motive for raising this question cannot be firm. For Neumann’s critique, see
572. Franz Neumann an Max Horkheimer, 23 July 1941. 103-109 and 573. Franz Neumann and Max Horkheimer, 30
July 1941. 109-110. Horkheimer’s reply is 575. Max Horkheimer an Franz Neumann, New York. 2 August 1941. 115121. All correspondence reproduced in the Horkheimer correspondence volume cited above. The dispute about
Pollock’s “state capitalism” is widely regarded as the most important indicator of differences between Neumann and
the core group of the Institute. The classic statement is Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown,
1973) 143-172, esp. 161-167. Peter Intelmann carefully reviews the substantive issues, with detailed attention to
Behemoth in Franz L. Neumann [fn. 15], 234-251. The question of bureaucracy figures only at the outermost margin in
this and in other accounts of the conflict. In my view, however, while it is doubtless true that his unwillingness to
abandon the Marxist model of class conflict and a potential working class rebellion played an important part in
Neumann’s rejection of the“state capitalism” model, the importance to Neumann of the modern state as contrast
model to the Nazi totalitarian polycracy requires more curiosity about his assessment of the bureaucracy, which
Hegel, the writer he credited with being the “last” political philosopher, had called the “universal class.” In a rather
confused passage inthe transcript of Neumann’s University Seminar presentation on the management of the Nazi
war economy, Neumann is reported as saying that the Nazis did not succeed in their “revolutionary” attempt in 1943
to shift to technocratic controls, not least because “the bureaucracy in Germany became the organ of one group and
thus became incapable of performing its function of protecting the general interest.” University Seminar 401-402, 5th
Meeting, THE STATE, 6. In the context of the present study, moreover, it is clear that Neumann’s attachment to a
more conventionally Marxist reading of the situation is no less a function of his determination to identify a
possibility of political action as well as his loyalty to comrades in the socialist exile, than of personal orthodoxy.
23
heteronomy” than the ruled. Normally, both command and obedience can be smoothly derived from the
forces of production. But in Nazi Germany, the relations between social organization and the forces of
production are so misshapen that the “ruling class continues to be in possession of authority although it
lacks the quality of authority.” Under these circumstances, “the bureaucracy is merely the expression of
this distortion, the alienated force of the historically condemned class.” 32 There is no record of a reply by
Neumann, but the definition in Behemoth remained uninfluenced by Horkheimer’s objections.33
While there is no doubt that Neumann continued to speak in the accents of the Institute when he
came to Columbia, and equally little doubt that Wittfogel and Solomon-Delatour opposed him as a
representative of that school, it may be said that Neumann’s measured distance from Horkheimer on the
“subjectivity” of bureaucrats and his more vehement disagreements with his fellow-exiles in the State
Seminar had a common ground in Neumann’s conception of political power and of political studies as
focused– in theoretical reflection, empirical inquiry, and strategic orientation– on the historically variable
relationships between political power and political freedom, none of which figure importantly in the
“political culturism” that emerges as the distinguishing theoretical practice of the “Frankfurt School.”34
“Approaches to the Study of Political Power” (1950) and “The Concept of Political Freedom”
(1953) are consequently the titles of the only two articles that Neumann ever published in periodicals
32
578. Max Horkheimer an Franz Neumann, 13 August 1941, 127-128.
33
See Franz. L. Neumann, Behemoth (19442) 368-369
See Alfons Soellner, “‘Political Culturism’ Adorno’s ‘Entry-point’ in the Cultural Concert of German Post-war
History.” in Kettler and Lauer, Exile, Science and Bildung. [fn 15] On aporia in the concept of power in the work of the
representative of the “Frankfurt School” closest to Neumann, see David Kettler, “Herbert Marcuse. The Critique of
Bourgeois Civilization and Its Transcendence,” in Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue, eds., Contemporary
Political Philosophers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975, and London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1976) 1-48.
34
24
with wide circulation among American political scientists. 35 In the opening paragraph of the power
essay, Neumann says disarmingly that he does not pretend to say “add any new idea to a discussion of
political power,” but rather to aid “younger students” by laying “bare the approaches to its study.”36
Neumann opens with a rejection of approaches that identify politics completely with power politics and
that treat the psychology of power as the core problem, a position he imputes to a line of thinkers from
Machiavelli to Harold Laswell. This, he claims, “appears to have become the predominant trait of
American and, perhaps, of modern political science in general.” (4) The key to his rejection of this
“technical” view is that political control is “always a two-sided relationship,” (3) entailing at least the
question whether and to what extent the acceptance of commands in a given context is a function of the
rational, as well as emotional capacities of human beings. The mode of analysis must be capable of
recognizing when power claimants do not address rational capacities (or subjects of power do not expect
or demand it) or when power is wholly reduced to the threat and infliction of violence, ending in
liquidation. He concludes his preliminary argument thus:
The rejection of the psychological approach involves in its positive aspect the view that
politics (and thus history) is not simply a struggle of power groups for power, but an
attempt to mold the world according to one’s image, to impress one’s view upon it. The
historical process has a meaning.” (5)
Franz Neumann, “Approaches to the Study of Political Power,” Political Science Quarterly, 65:2 (June, 1950),
161-180 and “The Concept of Political Freedom,” Columbia Law Review, 53:7 (November, 1953) 901- 935. Both are
reprinted in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State [fn. 18]. In the title note to the latter article, Neumann says
that “parts of it were read as papers to Arthur W. Macmahon’s Seminar on the State.” Since Macmahon was
evidently replaced by Merton as Chair of the Seminar after 1946-1947, Neumann’s reference may be to his
presentations on bureaucracy, although it is more likely that the reference is to some later sessions for which
minutes are not available.
35
36Franz
Neumann, “Approaches to the Study of Political Power,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State [fn.
18], 3. Numbers in parentheses in the text above will refer to this article.
25
Having asserted that reasoned rationales for power are relevant to both the exercises and the study of
political power, Neumann proceeds to a typology of value-laden attitudes towards power, which must be
uncovered by the “soul searching of the political scientist,” (5) because one or the other will invariably
shape their approaches. “The valuative premises must be made clear,” he adds, “so that objective
analysis may be possible.” (5)
His nine types, which cannot be developed here, are introduced by a sharp contrast between the
community-centered affirmative concept of Plato and Aristotle and “the Augustinian position” for which
all political power is evil, and then extended to the “common-sense” Thomistic view, whose ambivalence
towards political power “prepared the way for the liberal attitude.” This is, of course, a crucial type for
Neumann:
Its sole concern is the erection of fences around political power which is, allegedly,
distrusted. Its aim is the disssolution of power into legal relationships, the elimination of
the element of personal rule, and the substitution of the rule of law in which all
relationships are to become purposive-rational, that is predictable and calculable. (6)
Having characterized the first three approaches without evaluation, he asserts that this is “of course, in
large measure an ideology” to obscure the locus of power, since “power cannot be dissolved in law.”(7)
His typically provocative citation in support of the last conclusion is a passage from the most unliberal
Joseph De Maistre, pointing out the presence of hidden forces behind the law as written, which are
indispensable to the state. (20) Such unexpected evocations add a recurrent element of surprise to
Neumann’s works, even when he seems to be doing routine cataloguing. Accordingly, he next offers an
“Epicurean attitude” as an approach, which makes the barest demands on political power and treats the
rest with indifference, and he sees similarities to the “psychological consequences” of the former in his
next type of approach, anarchism, inasmuch as its denunciation of all political power may lead to aloof
indifference or putschist moves to establish an associative society at will. (7) This brings him to Marxism,
26
which he credits with a “positive attitude towards political power” but only until political power has
smashed the conditions for its historical–not “natural”–existence. (7) Rousseau’s “positive attitude” in
turn moves back in the direction of Plato and Aristotle, inasmuch as power is everywhere present but
nowhere separate from other communal relations in view of “the alleged identity of rulers and ruled.”
Neumann ends with “the liberal democrat” who differs from the “total democrat” of Rousseau primarily
because he does not accept “the total politicizing of life” and thus insists on the “separate character of
political power.” On balance, however, “he is increasingly concerned with the potentialities of a rational
use of power.” (8)
After this introductory section, which illustrates very well Neumann’s uses of the political theory
literature as an analytical resource, there follow sections on the significance of political power, the roots
of political power, the identification of political power, and political power and freedom. The argument
is an elaboration of Neumann’s principal points in the 1946-1947 seminar. He points, first, to the growing
complexity of the mix of persuasion, benefits and violence in the constitution of political power, and its
expansion overall, to cope with the growing complexity of society. Second, then, the relationship
between economic and political power becomes more difficult to delineate, and political power becomes
ever more independent in its dynamics (up to the limiting case of the Soviet Union, where economic
power seems to arise out of the political). This is the context in which the question of bureaucracy
belongs, since the rise of politics and of bureaucracy go together. The extent to which bureaucrats
exercise power is an empirical question, although it is clear that they exercise some. The blanket hostility
to the “ascendant role of political power” is anti-democratic in inspiration and implication, as is the
ideological misuse of distrust of bureaucracy. The typology of attitudes to power makes it clear that there
is no univocal opposition to political power in “the tradition of Western civilization,” which is frequently
arrayed against these changes. “Certainly one can say,” Neumann maintains, “that Rousseauism is a
more important element in the political tradition of of democracy than the essentially self-contradictory
27
and arbitrary doctrines of Locke and the natural law.” (16) He concludes this part of the argument: “The
problem of modern democracy is much less the fencing of political power than its rational utilization and
provision for effective mass participation in its exercise.” (16) After a short interlude, in which he recurs
surprisingly to Carl Schmitt’s thesis that the locus of power is most clearly revealed in an emergency
situation, Neumann picks up the liberal democratic thesis, which forms the transition to his “political
freedom” article, but he does so in a markedly pessimistic vein.
To say, as he provisionally did at the outset, that ideas are as relevant to political study as power
is “too ideological,” Neumann now argues. “If history were a conflict between power groups and ideas,
ideas would invariably be defeated.” (18) The problem is to identify the power group among those in
conflict which may more nearly, in that context, represent the “idea of freedom.” Sweepingly, he asserts
that “the task of political theory is thus the determination of of the degree to which a power group
transcends its particular interests and advocates (in Hegelian terms) universal interests.” Having made
this seemingly guileless statement, he turns immediately to the difficulty of distinguishing truth from
ideology when attempting to make such judgments, especially because of the weight of a public opinion
that submits so easily to authority, so that the persuasiveness of an idea says nothing about its rationality.
The liar may become the hero, because he evades the weight of this force. Neumann ends with another of
his unexpected citations, a long quotation from Charles S. Peirce, who speaks of the role played by
“moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its full approval” (19) in maintaining
uniformity. Beyond that, Neumann quotes Peirce as saying, the “peaceful and sympathetic man” will
persecute himself until he finds himself forced “to submit his opinions to authority.” (19) 37 Neumann’s
habit of partially subverting his own argument by the insertion of points taken from political opponents
37Neumann’s
quotation is from Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Philosophy of Peirce, edited
by Justus Buchler (New York:Harcourt Brace & Co, 1940) 20.
28
and unbelievers (De Maistre, Schmitt, Peirce) enacts his self-monitoring against ideological conformity:
there is always that edge that sustains the provisional, exploratory character of the inquiry, even when it
is punctuated as well by flat assertions on the borderline of dogmatism. In his writings, as in his studies,
there is always a speaker present, and a voice.
Neumann’s essay on political freedom opens with a reassertion of his thesis on “the task of
political theory,” now restated as the seemingly hopeless but indispensable “attempt to pierce the layers
of symbols, statements, ideologies and thus come to the core of truth.” 38 “Political freedom, he asserts, is
the truth of political theory, but no political system can ever fully realize freedom. In consequence, he
maintains, echoing the position of Horkheimer, “all political theory must by necessity be critical.” (162)
As the article goes on to make clear, however, the criticism must always be validated by a measure of
realism; it presupposes as accurate and understanding as possible of the situation and its possibilities.
This is what Neumann calls the “cognitive” element of freedom, which he traces to the apothegm,
“freedom is the recognition of necessity.” Neumann’s other two aspects of freedom are the “juridical,”
which comprehends the ethical element in the doctrine of rule of law (which also possesses instrumental
and ideological elements)39 and the “volitional,” which concerns participation and takes up the problems
of alienation and fear, which we have encountered so often in his work:
Franz Neumann, “The Concept of Political Freedom” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State [fn. 18], 160200, 162. Numbers in parentheses above will refer to this article.
38
Neumann’s proccupation with rule of law is quite properly the subject of much commentary on his work. Franz L.
Neumann, The Rule of Law. Political Theory and the Legal System of Modern Society. ([1935] Leamington Spa, Heidelberg,
Dover NH: Berg, 1986) and “The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society,” The Democratic and the
Authoritarian State [fn. 15] 22-68. In addition to the literature cited in the articles by Kettler noted above, see William
E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994).
39
1994). The difficulty of reconciling Flyvbjerg’s approach with the efforts to make “social science matter” in the
sphere of legal studies and practice, in the context of rights, for example, would require a quite different article,
where Neumann could again serve as a valuable teacher, both for his insights into possibilities and for his
recognition of limitations.
29
If the concept of ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ do constitute the ‘energetic principles’ of politics, a
democratic political system is impossible, whether the fear is produced from within or
from without. Montesquieu correctly observed that fear is what makes and sustains
dictatorships. If freedom is [among other things] absence of restraints, the restraints to
be removed today are many; the psychological restraint of fear ranks first.” (194)
Neumann underlines this emphasis by closing with another mainstay of American pragmatist
philosophy, John Dewey, in a passage where he speaks warningly of “the stage of development in which
a vague and mysterious feeling of uncertain terror seizes the populace.” (194)40
Neither the dark overtones of these writings nor their emphasis on models, problems, and theses
derived from the political thinkers of the past means that Neumann despaired of empirical study to give
a realistic handhold for political practice. These articles, in fact, were proposed as the opening chapters of
Neumann’s unfinished major project on “Political Systems and Political Theory,” for which he received
funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, at a unique moment at the end of 1952, when the Social Science
Division under John Willits suddenly decided that their policy of fostering behaviorial and quantitative
methodologies required a balancing emphasis on “law, morals, and ethics.” Neumann’s role at that
moment in the Foundation’s history was not limited to his precisely timed application, since he also
played a vocal part in the “First Conference on Legal and Political Philosophy” convened by the
Rockefeller Foundation from October 31 to November 2, 1952 at its conference center at Arden House,
Harriman, NY.41 His initial intervention at that Conference, spoken with the confidence of his
40
The quotation is from John Dewey, Character and Events (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 819.
The correspondence leading up to the conference is to be found at the Rockefeller Foundation Archives,
RG3/910/8/74 (1951-2); the Proceedings are in two bound volumes at RFA, RG3/910/9/81-2 (November 1-2, 1952);
the Neumann proposal is also at RFA, FLN to JHW, RG1.1/200/320/3805 (November 25, 1952), with a copy in the
Columbiana Archives at Columbia University: Neumann, Franz L. (Political Science) 1952-1955.
41
30
professorial status and wide student following, lays down a challenge:
The question is, shouldn’t political theory be dangerous? Isn’t that the very function of
political theory – to be dangerous? Don’t we face a situation that, in many cases, political
theory and propaganda become indistinguishable? Isn’t it the function of political theory
to be, so to speak, the critical conscience of political science? That is the primary role of
political theory, as I see it. This, however, requires that political theory, apart from the
study of its history, should not be taught in vacuo, but it should be taught in very close
contact with the other segments of political science and other social sciences. To me it is
not understandable that a course in political institutions should be taught regardless of
political theory; and that theory, political theory is, so to speak, a segment where you
learn certain things which have no bearing whatsoever on public administration, on
comparative government, on American government, and so on. There is already a
setting in of a fragmentation in which political theory appears merely as a segment in
addition to other segments. This is, in my view, due to the fact that the critical role of
political theory in the analysis of political phenomena and political structures is not
properly recognized, and that the injection of political theory considerations into the
teaching or the writing of political institutions leaves very much to be desired. Therefore
this twofold orientation: to be critical but to cooperate very closely with the other
segments of political science is, in my view, one of the principal and main problems that
1952-1955. A copy was submitted earlier to the Twentieth-Century Fund, and it appears in the RF records in
connection with a rather embarrassing report that Neumann had failed to report prior funding from that agency
when he applied to Rockefeller. The matter was smoothed over, with the help of Columbia’s department head,
but J.H. Willits made a notation precluding Neumann from future Rockefeller funding.
31
ought to be discussed.”42
Neumann underlines this dualistic position in two follow-up letters to J.W. Willits at the Rockefeller
Foundation and to his Columbia junior colleague, Herbert A. Deane, who had been selected by Robert I.
MacIver to manage the new Rockefeller departure. Having written briefly immediately after the
conference to underline his strong dissent from “political theory-empirical studies” dichotomy, which he
calls a “very dangerous confrontation,” he lays out his position at greater length ten days later. He offers
a list of neglected historical figures, whose thought has a special bearing on the present; he urges studies
using methods of sociology of knowledge and history of ideas; but then he returns to his prime theme:
Yet our primary task to determine the truth of a political theory is to develop a true political
theory for today. . . .My own view . . . is that the truth of political theory is determined by its
ability to maximize the freedom of man in a specific historical situation. I reject both [skeptical
and dogmatic] extremes and I base the determination of the truth on the empirical analysis of a
concrete historical stage as well as on philosophical thought. The reason is this: political theory is
not and cannot be pure philosophy. It does not deal with eternal categories (like time, space,
being, essence, accidents). It deals with politics and thus with power, which is an historical
category. The great attraction – and the great difficulty – of political theory is precisely the need
for this dual approach: theory and its empirical validation.” 43
42
Proceedings [fn 35], 54-55.
43Neumann
to Willits, November 12, 1952 and November 24, 1952, RG3/910/8/75. The preparation for and followup of this Conference, as well as its Proceedings would repay thorough study, not least because it is also quite
revealing about the abyss between political and legal thought at the time. The Rockefeller venture in Political and
Legal Thought yielded a few senior grants, including a year’s salary to Neumann, as well as a pre-doctoral fellowship
program that lasted one or two years. [The author was the lucky recipient of one of the latter fellowships for 1954-5,
but not on nomination by Franz Neumann.] Because of vigorous opposition to the program within the Rockefeller
Foundation, the operation was transferred to the Social Science Research Council as soon as Willits retired, with a
grant of $25,000 p.a. to fund eight pre-doctoral fellowships for each of three years. The SSRC in turn organized a
small “Conference on Legal Philosophy and Political Theory” in November, 1954 (after Neumann’s death), divided
32
Neumann’s use of commonplace scientific language is misleading, since his concept of “validation” is
quite different from any notion of empirical verification. A clearer idea of his meaning is provided by the
research proposal that he presented to the Rockefeller Foundation as a specification of his general
themes.44
To “validate” a political theory is to show that its normative and interpretative elements apply to the
realities of the day, as we have seen, that it can make sense of them and orient conduct appropriate to
them. Present-day democratic theory, Neumann asserts, is merely a “myth” because it is unrelated to the
present-day state of knowledge, material advance and power. The changes include dramatic shifts in
economic power, the rise of new social groups, the displacement of individualistic by pluralistic
competition (and other changes in mechanisms of society), changes in governmental structure, especially
the rise of the executive and bureaucracy, the increased weight of political power in socio-economic
processes, and “the shift from enlightenment to propaganda and the resulting increased role of the
communications media.” He asks whether a system geared to an agrarian society can suffice, and he
contends:
This question can [...] be answered only through a genuinely comparative study of political
systems. The comparative study must also be theoretical and historical, that is, they must be seen
in the process of social and political change. Only then can we hazard a forecast whether our
institutions will be capable of peaceful adjustment to a fundamentally changed environment.
Because in present-day political science American institutions are treated apart, political theory is
separated from the study of institutions, an almost exclusive emphasis is given to behavioristic aspects,
between a group of senior political scientists, who tended to think the money should be used to train political
theorists in behavioral methods, and a group of junior political theorists, very much on the defensive.
44
All quoted materials from Neumann to Willits, November 25, 1952 [fn 35]
33
interconnections between economy, social systems and political systems are neglected, “very little
historical awareness illuminates current political thinking,” — for all of these reasons,“there is no longer
a theory of political institutions.” In order to gain for the present day what Aristotle, Bodin, and
Montesquieu achieved for theirs, Neumann proposes to follow the procedures anticipated in his articles
on political power and political freedom (which he anticipates as forthcoming). Through a typology of
various political power-political freedom interrelations, he hopes to generate a reclassification and reevaluation of the Aristotelian scheme of constitutions. The principal focus and objective will be the
problem of change from democracy to dictatorship and from dictatorship to democracy, with major
changes in predominant political ideas studied as symptoms and precursors of such changes. Revealing
the implicit diagnosis out of which the project arises, Neumann turns at the end to the observation, which
he claims was anticipated by Aristotle and Montesquieu, that changes from democracy to dictatorship
depends upon the ability of anti-democratic groups to mobilize and manipulate anxiety and fear. He
concludes: “The analysis of the socio-economic changes, the techniques for coming to power, and the
changes in the thought structures will thus be focussed on the psychological processes which make man a
fearful animal.”
3. In Lieu of a Conclusion
It was noted much earlier that “learning from” is a poorly understood process. I think of it as a
negotiation, where the parties bring their resources and needs to the table, and seek to strike the best
possible bargain, an especially difficult matter when only one of the parties is actively present, and s/he
can only pay off in respect. Although I offer this account of Neumann as an instructive bit of history for
the present stage of the recurrent effort to make social science work an activity whose ethical content goes
to social and political responsibility, beyond the immanent ethics needed to shape any credible claim to
34
knowledge, I cannot dictate what anyone can learn. All I can do is to offer some reasons for granting him
recognition, which is a precondition of any bargaining relationship. First of all, anyone who puts before
us the threats posed by regimes of fear, however s/he gets there, matters today. Second, even if we
cannot put our attempts at diagnosis in Neumann’s conventional terms of imputing “meaning” to
“history,” we can recognize the metaphorical significance of this old figure, as emblem of the task of
constructing rich models of social complexity and social change. Neumann’s sober ironies assure us that
he is not offering us some wholistic schematic. Third, and in conclusion, I return to my borrowing of
Reinhard Laube’s alternatives of “deproblematization” or “reproblematization” of Weber’s distinction
between scientific understanding and ethical-political choice. What I fear in Flyvbjerg’s argument (rather
than in his examples) is the misleading impression that there is a social science method to make politics
unnecessary in principle, except insofar as in practice those Cicero called “the wicked” in the Cataline
Orations must somehow be induced to “depart.” That is what is entailed by the “deproblematization” of
Weber in the twentieth-century state of the relevant questions. I have tried to follow Neumann’s
“reproblematization” of Weber where the conjunction of explorations in ethical possibilities (as embodied
in the concept of “political freedom”) and “sociological” investigations of power relations is brought
together in a strategic political interpretation that presupposes that it will always have to battle against
coherent–indeed, “rational”– opposition, as well as resilient patterns of resistances of other kinds. The
“truth” of Neumann’s political theory is a category that is itself, on Neumann’s showing, full of
uncertainties and unfulfilled promises.
Weber speaks of “courage” at the end of “Politics as a
Vocation,” but identifies it with a self-abnegation of human desire. Neumann’s vision is no less tragic,
but he will insist on a more intellectual and democratic conception of responsibility. Neumann’s last
public lecture, on the connection between science and political freedom, given at the Free University a
few months before his death, having asserted that “only the political act itself, our activity can bring and
secure freedom,” closed with the following adaptation of Weber’s concept of political responsibility:
35
One may consider Max Weber’s conception of the objectivity of the social sciences as mistaken–as
I do– but this principle which he enunciated in “Science as a Profession” I consider to be the only
possible one in practice: that all political questions ought to be discussed openly and without
rancor, that no scholar and teacher has the obligation of accepting a political system, but that each
of them has the obligation, knowing his own prejudices, of discussing openly and rationally
every political action and conception. These seem to me to be the connections between
intellectual and political freedom. Although it is only one element of the political freedom of
man, free scientific inquiry in a free society is indispensable for the self-determination of man.45
Franz Neumann, “Intellectual and Political Freedom,” The Democratic and the Authoritarian State [fn. 15], 201-215,
215. This conclusion is prefaced by an earnest–and evidently conflicted–confrontation with the “Epicurean”
alternative, as put forward by Atticus in his correspondence with Cicero. He adduces both moral and pragmatic
reasons against such an attempt to escape.
45
36