Franz Neumann Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Franz Neumann (1900–1954) was a German political activist and labor lawyer. He is linked to a school of other labor lawyers such as Otto Kahn-Freund and Hermann Heller who developed the “autonomous social law” tradition of legal scholar Hugo Sinzheimer. This was an attempt to materially institutionalize as actual legal practices the workers’ self-governance provisions of the Weimar Republic Constitution.

This concept of autonomous social law ironically was influenced by German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s jurisprudential concept of “complementary institution” (Konnexinstitut). The concept subsumed collective labor agreements, which forced into the background the principal institutions, such as the individual prerogative contract, which they originally intended to serve. The generation of collective bargaining agreements, labor courts, and works communities were understood as the vital institutionalizing undercurrent in social democracy. Neumann would go on to focus on the forces that defeated the movement for autonomous social law—a movement he saw as the next stage in the historically evolving project of the rule of law.

Neumann is chiefly remembered for his 1942 landmark study Behemoth, which depicts the synchronizing (Gleichschaltung) efforts of Nazi totalitarianism amidst the collapse of law as well as the absence of formal legal and state apparatuses in blanket clauses and discretionary decision making where classes and groups—not individuals—are referred to. The blanket clauses endowed “deformalized” state apparatuses with unlimited means to proceed against any and all opponents of the regime without the possibility of judicial review. Neumann is also known for the posthumous 1957 collection, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, which included the 1937 essay “The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society.” In this work he focused on how a civil society evolves its forms and procedures. Also included were his 1950s writings on rationalization, the cognitive-volitional elements involved in freedom, and the impossibility of a complete legal containment of political power.

Of equal and even more lasting significance are Neumann’s early social law writings and his 1936 London School of Economics doctoral dissertation, The Governance of the Rule of Law, supervised by English political theorist Harold Laski and Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim. These writings reflect creative attempts at a pluralist jurisprudence. These were perspectives comprehending the reality of autonomous associations as multiple regimes operating within and beside the sovereign state. Conceptualized here is a “pluralist legal ordering” that functions as distinct subsystems of knowledge and practice. Neumann sought to transcend communitarian myths involved in natural law theories. His focus was on the norm-generating authority of autonomous associations and its relationship to the concept of the “rule of law” (die Herrschaft des Gesetzes). He emphasized the making of rules and laws that goes on within the civil society, where all is subject to open-ended rational discussion. This is in contrast with the perspective of Schmitt, who understood the only authoritative set of laws (Recht) to be those established by a centralized sovereign state.

After leaving London, Neumann worked closely with German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research, currently located at Columbia University, but his affinities were closer to Laski and Mannheim. Just after World War II (1939–1945), Neumann assisted chief prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. He also participated in reconstituting the Social Democratic Party and the discipline of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Neumann played a prominent role in efforts by the Rockefeller Foundation to make political theory a core component in the political science curriculum. In 1949 he was appointed to a continuing professorship at Columbia, where he and Robert Denoon Cumming developed a tradition of studying political theory as a sociologies history of ideas that remains relevant to theorizing.

In particular, Neumann probed the limits of the interpretive mode of collective labor law as the century unfolded as well as the emergence of practices of multipartite consultations and bargaining among plural associations.These practices characterize what political sociologist Gerhard Lehmbruch has labeled the “negotiated democracy” of advanced capitalism. Neumann’s efforts also anticipated the idea of “reflexive law. «This is a concept that classifies the norms, procedures, and rule making that those in plural associations design and establish to govern themselves and their relationships with other associations. They are what Adorno’s student Jürgen Habermas referred to as the limitations that direct the self-steering govern mentality mechanisms of social subsystems.

Bibliography:

Iser, Martin, and David Strecker, eds. Kritische Theorie der Politik. Franz L. Neumann—Eine Bilanz. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2002.
Kettler, David. Domestic Regimes, the Rule of Law and Democratic Social Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Galda + Wilch, 2001.
Neumann, Franz L. Behemoth.The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933 -1944. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1944.
The Democratic and the Authoritarian State. Edited by Herbert Marcuse. New York: Free Press, 1957.
(The Governance of) The Rule of Law. Ph.D. dissertation, London School of Economics, 1936. Leamington Spa, U.K.: Berg, 1986.
Perels, Joachim, ed. Recht, Demokratie, und Kapitalismus: Aktualitat und Probleme der Theorie Franz L. Neumann. Germany: Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984.
Scheuerman,William E. Between the Norm and the Exception:The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

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