Franz Neumann (political scientist)

Franz Leopold Neumann (23 May 1900 – 2 September 1954) was a German political activist, Western Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of Nazism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945. During the Second World War, Neumann spied for the Soviet Union under the code-name "Ruff". Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Neumann was born in to a Jewish family on May 23, 1900, in Kattowitz (Katowice), Silesia, German Empire (present day Poland). As a student Neumann supported the German November revolution of 1918 and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt am Main, where in 1918 he met Leo Löwenthal, a future colleague in the Institute for Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer. At Breslau (the present-day Wrocław in Poland), Leipzig, Rostock, and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment. His main aim was to explain the socialist acceptance of liberal individualism in this sphere, in contradiction to Socialist theory. In the academic exercise that earned his degree, he did not actually attempt the sociological study he saw as necessary but addressed preliminary philosophical issues in the neo-Kantian debates of the day. However, his treatment of value philosophy led him to the conclusion that the antithetical liberal and socialist arguments were equally valid, and that the Socialist deviations from consistency in the matter of punishment was politically justifiable and subject only to political management. This most abstruse exercise, accordingly, foretells his lifelong reliance on negotiated settlements even if they involved exceptions from theoretical consistency. The trick was to take care that the effects of such deviations are not cumulative—as he came to conclude about the Socialist movement's compromises in Weimar.

Neumann was active from 1925 to 1927 as law clerk and assistant of Hugo Sinzheimer, the foremost reformist labor law theorist, who also engaged him as a teacher at the trade union academy affiliated with the University of Frankfurt. Throughout the Weimar years, Neumann's political commitment was to the labor wing of the Social Democratic Party. From 1928 to 1933 he worked in Berlin in partnership with Ernst Fraenkel as an attorney specializing in labor law, representing trade unions and publishing briefs and articles, and a technical book in this innovative field. In 1932–33 he became lead attorney for the Social Democratic Party and published a brief, itself suppressed by the Nazis, against the suppression of the principal Social Democratic newspaper.

In the weeks after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Neumann was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled to England. There he studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and with the former Frankfurt sociology professor, Karl Mannheim. He earned a second doctorate with a study of the rise and fall of the historical epoch of the rule of law. On Laski's recommendation, Neumann was employed by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (in exile at Columbia University in New York City after some years in Geneva and Paris) in 1936, initially as administrator and legal advisor, and later as research associate, although he was never as well established in the group led by the Director, Max Horkheimer, as Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno. He participated in the Institute's debates about national socialism in the New York years. By the time the 2nd edition of Behemoth was published in 1944 he rejected the idea that the Nazis were merely using Jews as scapegoats for the ills of German society. Instead what he called a "spearhead theory" arguing that Nazi antisemitism was a test run leading towards the goal of replacing democratic norms with a totalitarian government. This well-known study of the Nazi regime, however, was written without the scrutiny of the Institute's review procedures. Neumann played an important part in helping the Institute to secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for its well-known study of antisemitism.

Neumann achieved his academic reputation among American scholars with the publication of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942. The thesis is that National Socialist rule is a function of struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labor movement and that Nazi Germany consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern political formation oriented to order and predictability. Within this framework, Neumann applied many Marxist tools of analysis to characterize the prime social component in the inner struggle. Behemoth made a major impact on the young sociologist C. Wright Mills. While opinions differed about his theses, his mastery of German sources and rich empirical documentation drew applause from established American political scientists and the book prepared the way for his later university career.

The reception of Behemoth laid the foundation for Neumann's wartime career in Washington after the Institute's leadership declared itself financially unable to retain his services. Until the first months of 1943, Neumann served as a part-time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, staffing routine studies of trade patterns. He then became deputy head of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration. The position also allowed him to place a number of his Institute associates, who had been made redundant by the core group around Horkheimer. Neumann was instrumental in producing intelligence reports on the Nazis for the OSS, later published in a single volume Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort.

Neumann's friend, Paul Massing, a Soviet spy, reported to Moscow that Neumann had told him that he had produced a study of the Soviet economy for the OSS's Russian Department. In April 1943, Elizabeth Zarubina, a Soviet spy in the United States, and the wife of Vassily Zarubin, met with Neumann: "(Zarubina) met for the first time with (Neumann) who promised to pass us all the data coming through his hands. According to (Neumann), he is getting many copies of reports from American ambassadors... and has access to materials referring to Germany." Neumann's code name was "Ruff".

Franz Neumann promised to cooperate fully during his initial meeting with Zarubina, after becoming a naturalized American citizen later that year he appeared to become reluctant to pass secret information. One memorandum sent to Moscow in early January 1944 described a conversation between Neumann and his friends Paul and Hede Massing, in which they "directly asked him about the reasons for his ability to work" and tried to determine whether he had changed his mind. Neumann responded: "I did not change my mind. If there is something really important, I will inform you without hesitation."