The Historical and Conceptual Context

The rise of National Socialism in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s presented a stark challenge to the binary opposition of free market capitalism and planned economies. To be schematic, once Hitler took power, the National Socialist government privatized rather than nationalized financial, banking, and heavy industries, eviscerated labor organizing, and enabled the formation of goliath corporate monopolies, such as the I. G. Farben and the Krupp works, that operated freely under the thumb of the Nazi state. The Nazi leaders put in place a centralized war economy but allowed private enterprise to do its bidding.Footnote ²⁸ As a centralized form of capitalism that included not only state planning but also private enterprise, National Socialism defied the free market-government interference dyad from early Physiocratic thought and invisible hand and laissez-faire economic theories.

On those earlier understandings, economic growth depended on free markets, as opposed to government regulated economies. Those formed two competing visions of political economy by the early twentieth century: liberal market economies in Western Europe and the United States at one end, and centralized planning by a communist party in the Soviet Union at the other. To be sure, the enhanced economic role of the US government during the New Deal, as well as the wartime economies of Great Britain and the US, put a strain on this simplistic understanding; they also greatly worried free market proponents like Friedrich Hayek, whose protestations ultimately served to reify the dichotomy. But still, the contrast between capitalist and controlled economies defined the geography of mid-twentieth-century economics.Footnote ²⁹

Most economic historians at the time agreed that capitalism had surely undergone structural changes—and this was before the “New History of Capitalism” current of thought, the new histories of capitalism and slavery, and the important work on racial capitalism in the post-war period.Footnote ³⁰ At the time, most historians agreed that earlier forms of capitalism had evolved throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and especially during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, to give rise to more mature forms of capitalism. Historians and economists disagreed about the exact periodization, labels, and telos but agreed that Western industrial societies were in an advanced stage of capitalism.

This led to different ways of analyzing the shifts and changes of capitalism, and different periodizations. Some scholars referred to “late capitalism” (Spätkapitalismus) or “late-stage capitalism,” a term originally used at the turn of the twentieth century by the German economist Werner Sombart to describe the period of capitalism after World War I (in Der Moderne Kapitalismus, 1902–1927), but then adopted by both orthodox Marxist theorists (such as Ernest Mandel, Der Spätkapitalismus, 1972, published in English as Late Capitalism in 1975) and by Frankfurt School thinkers (such as Adorno in “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society,” 1968; and Jürgen Habermas in Legitimation Crisis, published under the original title of Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus in 1973) to describe the period after World War II and the end stages of capitalism.^{Footnote 31} Others used the term “monopoly capitalism,” generally understood to have coincided with the rise of imperialism and colonization from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; this term was closely associated with Lenin and his 1916 book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he understood the term to describe the imperialist condition of capitalism in which the state intervenes to protect large, monopolistic, capitalist enterprises. Still others referred to “advanced capitalism,” which had a slightly less endgame connotation to it and was less closely tied or associated with Marxist thought.

Regardless of the nomenclature, most thinkers agreed that capitalism had advanced to an industrialized stage through economic cycles that had included moments of crisis. The advent of German National Socialism posed the questions: first, how the Nazi economy related to those advanced forms of capitalism; and second, whether it inaugurated a new form of capitalism that would be more resilient to economic depression. How could Hitler’s Germany successfully adopt an economic arrangement that included opposite ends of the spectrum—private enterprise and centralized planning?

The National Socialist paradigm confounded the existing categories, periodizations, and labels, and, as a result, a slew of new terms emerged to grapple with this apparently new and hybrid form of capitalism: “state organized private-property monopoly capitalism,” “managerial society,” “administrative capitalism,” “bureaucratic collectivism,” “totalitarian state economy,” “status capitalism,” “neo-mercantilism,” “economy of force,” “state socialism,” “advanced oligopolistic capitalism,” “post-competitive capitalism,” and “post-market society.”^{Footnote 32} How best could the National Socialist economy be understood, and where would it lead? These questions were not simply economic. They were embedded in a larger political question regarding the future of liberal democracy in the face of totalitarianism. And they were nested within an argument over the best way to defeat fascism.

The Pollock–Neumann–Adorno Debate

The members of the Institute for Social Research shared a common starting point; namely, the belief that the only way to defeat National Socialism was to demonstrate the greater economic efficiency of democratic economic forms. Germans had experienced too much pain during the long depression to be convinced by anything other than economic stability and power, most members agreed. Friedrich Pollock, one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research and one of its principal economic thinkers, declared in no uncertain terms: “The totalitarian form of state capitalism is a deadly menace to all values of western civilization.”^{Footnote 33} The only way to defeat it was to show the potential of a new democratic form of state capitalism: “Those who want to maintain these values … must be able to show in what way the democratic values can be maintained under the changing conditions.”^{Footnote 34} Franz Neumann, a later member of the institute and a political-economic thinker, also emphasized that Germany could only be defeated through the example of a democratic model of economic power. Germans would not tolerate a return to the earlier economic conditions of depression, Neumann wrote.^{Footnote 35} However much they might yearn for peace and even abhor concentration camps, he noted that “he [the German] will never be satisfied with a status quo which again delivers him to the anarchic conditions of the great depression.”^{Footnote 36} The only way to beat National Socialism, Neumann declared, was to offer the vision of an efficient democracy:

In other words, to free the people from the chains of National Socialism, Western democracies needed to show the example of free, democratic, and importantly, efficient economic production.

At the same time, though—and creating a true paradox for Frankfurt School thinkers—the Western industrialized economy was in the “late” stages of capitalism marked by monopolistic and imperialistic tendencies that spelled its own demise. It was impossible for them to imagine that more of the same—more late-stage or monopoly capitalism marked by inequality and the exploitation of labor—could serve as the exemplar that would defeat National Socialism. And so, another set of problematics imposed themselves on the Frankfurt School: How could late Western industrialized capitalism be reformed into a force that could also defeat German National Socialism? The stakes could not have been higher for these previously Marxist economic thinkers exiled at Columbia University.

Within the institute, there emerged a sharp debate regarding both the proper diagnosis of the form of economic organization represented by National Socialism and the corresponding way to reform Western capitalism in order to defeat the Nazi regime. In broad strokes, the debate pitted Pollock against Neumann, with Horkheimer and Adorno commenting at the margins. Adorno would later return to this debate in 1968 and contribute importantly. In the following sections, I will flesh out the two positions of Pollock and Neumann and provide more background and context for those who are less familiar with the debate. I will then detail the later response of Theodor Adorno in 1968, whose untimely contribution to the Pollock–Neumann debate enriched it greatly and enlightens the present even more.

Friedrich Pollock on state capitalism. In his article “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” published in 1941, Friedrich Pollock proposed an overarching schema to understand the ongoing transformations of capitalism. The term he used was “state capitalism.”Footnote ³⁸ The Nazi political economy, Pollock argued, represented a new form and stage of capitalism that could be generalized into an ideal type of “state capitalism” in which the state controls the planning of the economy. National Socialism represented one of two possible variants of this new form of state capitalism: “totalitarian state capitalism.” But a second form was also possible: “democratic state capitalism.” And Pollock essentially argued that the creation of “democratic state capitalism”—a form of state capitalism controlled by the people rather than by a totalitarian elite—could be precisely the kind of efficient democratic economic form that could defeat totalitarianism.

In the article, Pollock sketches an argument that appears relatively innocuous. He presents his work rather innocently as merely beginning a conversation about, in his own words, “the workability of state capitalism.”^{Footnote 39} On the page, Pollock argues, first, that there was an earlier phase of “private capitalism” that involved “19th century free trade and free enterprise”; and, second, that the earlier phase of capitalism is irretrievably past as the result of the advent of “totalitarian state capitalism” under National Socialist Germany.^{Footnote 40} There is no hope of returning to that earlier phase of capitalism, no more than there was any hope in post-Napoleonic France to return to feudalism. The passage from private capitalism to state capitalism is as determinate, historically, as the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Trying to fight to restore private capitalism in the face of totalitarian state capitalism is a futile exercise, Pollock argues, that would lead only to the triumph of National Socialism—in Pollock’s words, “it can only lead to a waste of energy and eventually serve as a trail-blazer for totalitarianism.”^{Footnote 41} And although he is unsure whether there is a model of state capitalism (he uses Weberian ideal-type theory) that can be generalized from the National Socialist experience and that would allow for a democratic variant—he writes that there is “serious doubt” about whether such a model of state capitalism exists—he nevertheless proposes to start a conversation precisely to figure out the question: Is it possible to conceive of a model of state capitalism that would then allow for a democratic variant?^{Footnote 42}

So the exercise, according to Pollock, is simply to explore whether the new form of state capitalism—that is, state-directed, centrally planned—could be controlled by democratic processes. In effect, to rein in capitalism through democratic state control. And the difference between totalitarian and democratic state capitalism is that, in the first, the control is vested in the hands of a ruling elite made up of political, bureaucratic, or party leaders and the heads of industry and business. “Everybody who does not belong to this group is a mere object of domination.”^{Footnote 43} By contrast, in democratic state capitalism, the people control the state functions and can prevent the slide to totalitarianism.

One can identify several weaknesses to Pollock’s argument. For one, the idea that private capitalism was a laissez-faire model that was independent of state control and relied on market mechanisms buys into the myth of the free market. It fails to recognize how much that earlier form depended on state regulation. One can hear Pollock buy into that myth in his discussion: “Creation of an economic sphere into which the state should not intrude, essential for the era of private capitalism, is radically repudiated” by state capitalism.^{Footnote 44} But that is an illusion—as I and others have emphasized.Footnote ⁴⁵ Adorno too underscores this in his article “Late Capitalism of Industrial Society?” that we turn to shortly. So, the transition cannot be from private to state capitalism. It cannot be, in Pollock’s words, “the transition from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era.”^{Footnote 46} That is too simplistic. But we can put that aside for the moment.

Franz Neumann: National Socialism as a form of “totalitarian monopoly capitalism.” In his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, published in 1942, Franz Leopold Neumann interpreted National Socialism very differently than Pollock: far from a new stage of capitalism that bore any promise whatsoever, National Socialism was the necessary evil consequence of monopoly capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ National Socialism did not displace “monopoly capitalism,” but rather placed it under totalitarian rule. National Socialism was not a new form of “state capitalism.” It remained monopoly capitalism, but monopoly capitalism maintained by and directed at the behest of a totalitarian elite. The massive corporations and monopolies exploited the chaos and lawlessness of National Socialism to free themselves from the shackles of legal regulation and allied themselves with the Nazi leadership. Given the inevitable internal contradictions of late-stage monopoly capitalism, totalitarian administration was the only effective way to manage those contradictions and prevent the utter collapse of capitalism. Nazi economics were in effect a Frankenstein’s monster of late-stage monopoly capitalism—an irrational, chaotic, lawless, anarchic condition of domination without a coherent political theory; a non-state that forcibly kept the economy going for the power accumulation of a leader and the profit of the large industrial capitalists. Neumann emphasized that totalitarianism was necessary given late-stage capitalism: late capitalism demanded totalitarianism.

Democracy would endanger the fully monopolized capitalist system, Neumann argued. It was of the essence of totalitarianism to stabilize and fortify it.^{Footnote 48} And there was no silver lining to this form of capitalism, Neumann added. He was emphatic that National Socialism “could not possibly carry out its economic policy on a democratic basis.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, there could not be a democratic version of this economic form. Neumann summarized his position: “The German economy of today has two broad and striking characteristics. It is a monopolistic economy—and a command economy. It is a private capitalistic economy, regimented by the totalitarian state. We suggest as a name best to describe it, ‘Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism.’”Footnote ⁵⁰

Totalitarian monopoly capitalism. As David Held shows, Neumann retains the term “monopolistic” and conjoins it with “totalitarian” because his view of monopoly capitalism as a late stage of capitalism is fundamentally unstable and requires the intervention of a totalitarian state.^{Footnote 51} The monopolistic stage of capitalism, in Neumann’s view, must be upheld by authoritarian means. The cartel system would break down otherwise. This reflected Neumann’s more orthodox Marxist views. And the contrast to Pollock could not be greater: Totalitarian monopoly capitalism remains a form of private, not state, capitalism; totalitarian monopoly capitalism is not efficient; and democratic state capitalism is doomed to failure.

First, then, the inefficiency. In terms of the effectiveness of the National Socialist economy, by contrast to Pollock who argued for its efficiency, Neumann says that it is nil. Everything was already put in place under the Weimar Republic, and the Nazis added no value: “The contribution of the National Socialist party to the success of the war economy is nil. It has not furnished any man of outstanding merit, nor has it contributed any single ideology or organizational idea that was not fully developed under the Weimar Republic.”^{Footnote 52}

Second, National Socialism operates through selfish profit motives of the captains of industry. What motivates economic production is profit—not power, as Pollock argued. The profit motive remains determinative: “Mandeville’s contention that private vices are public benefits had now been raised to the rank of supreme principle—not for the masses, not for the retailers, wholesalers, and handicraft men, not for the small and middle businessmen, but for the great industrial combines.”^{Footnote 53} According to Neumann, the Nazi Party does not get involved in the economics. It leaves it to the designated captains of industry. “With all this the party does not interfere. The period of party interference in economics has ended long ago.”^{Footnote 54} Nevertheless, there is government everywhere—regulating credit and money markets, and monopolies, and foreign trade.^{Footnote 55}

Third, democratic-controlled planning is a non-starter. In discussing National Socialism, Neumann makes clear that democratic planning is a failed project. There are too many internal contradictions to make democratic planning possible, at least in Germany at the time, even if it would be a worthy goal, Neumann argues. The major problem is that “democratic planning, also, enlarges the power of the state; it adds the monopoly of economic coercion to the monopoly of political coercion.”^{Footnote 56} And this then triggers resistance from the monopolist capitalists, and so on.

In Neumann’s view, capitalism under the Weimar Republic had gravitated toward a form of “democratic monopoly capitalism.”^{Footnote 57} Under National Socialism, everything was oriented toward imperialist war: this brought about even further restrictions on capitalism, but it remained “capitalist”—governed by the capital interests of the business elite. National Socialism did not nationalize industry or become socialist because big business had all the same interests—getting rid of unions, eviscerating civil rights, gutting democracy. So, for Neumann, it was a perfect union of power and profit.^{Footnote 58}

The contrast with Pollock could not have been greater. Pollock viewed National Socialism as a new stage of capitalism—a new stage of economic organization—that solved the problems of monopoly capitalism and provided a potential way forward: democratic state capitalism. Pollock was not simply describing a wartime economy; he was describing an economic system that could maintain itself in contrast to forms of late-stage or advanced monopoly capitalism. By contrast, Neumann was describing a Frankenstein’s monster of late-stage capitalism that was irredeemable, with no silver lining. On their face, the two interpretations were diametrically opposed.

The Nazi Behemoth

Undergirding Neumann’s economic argument was a political argument that the Third Reich could not be considered a state because it had no coherent or rational political theory, did not abide by the rule of law, and in fact did not even create a realm of law. Nazi Germany, Neumann maintained, was a government by decree, with no cohesive justification, that contained “elements of every conceivable philosophy” jumbled together, purely for the purpose of maintaining absolute power in the hands of its leader, Hitler.^{Footnote 59} Mixing together incoherently, he argued, “idealism, positivism, pragmatism, vitalism, universalism, institutionalism” with “blood, community, folk” and “the charisma of the Leader, the superiority of the master race, the struggle of a proletarian race against plutocracies, the protest of the folk against the state,” National Socialism embraced, in Neumann’s words, “an opportunistic, infinitely elastic ideology” aimed at domination and control.^{Footnote 60}

There were, to be sure, identifiable coherent strands in Nazi ideology—Aryanism, the master race, a most exterminating antisemitism; but those strands mingled with myriad opportunistic ideologies and chaotic messages, all under one simple overarching ambition: power for the leader. “The National Socialist state is no Leviathan,” Neumann wrote. “But Hobbes, aside from his Leviathan also wrote Behemoth, or the Long Parliament.”^{Footnote 61} Neumann synthesized his view as follows: “These considerations lead us to conclude that National Socialism has no political theory of its own, and that the ideologies it uses or discards are mere arcana dominationis, techniques of domination. If that is true, it must, in my opinion, be granted that the German leadership is the only group in present German society that does not take its ideological pronouncements seriously and is well aware of their purely propagandistic nature.”^{Footnote 62}

It is for this reason that Neumann appropriated the term “Behemoth” from Hobbes to describe, as it was believed Hobbes had, the period under the Long Parliament, an “anti-rational,” “non-state” “chaos” that was “characterized by complete lawlessness,” in Neumann’s terms.^{Footnote 63}

Theodor Adorno and the illusion of capitalism. At the time, Theodor Adorno did not seem entirely satisfied with either position, and his more developed and important intervention would happen later in 1968. As the sociologist Christian Fuchs demonstrates in an essay titled “The Relevance of Franz L. Neumann’s Critical Theory in 2017,” Max Horkheimer leaned toward Pollock’s position of state capitalism in his lectures and essays, including “The Authoritarian State” (1940) and “The End of Reason” (1941), going so far as to state that “state capitalism is the authoritarian state of the present.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In his correspondence with Adorno, as Rolf Wiggershaus shows, Horkheimer criticized Neumann for failing to properly address the cultural–anthropological dimensions and therefore remaining too orthodox.^{Footnote 65} For his part, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that Pollock’s article displayed “the undialectical assumption that a non-antagonistic economy might be possible in an antagonistic society.”^{Footnote 66} At the time, Adorno seemed to feel that Pollock had given too rosy a picture of state capitalism, but he agreed with the criticism that Neumann was too dogmatic. Herbert Marcuse, for his part, took Neumann’s side in his paper “State and Individual Under National Socialism” (1942).Footnote ⁶⁷

The divisions and internal tensions were of course understandable. After all, these thinkers were dealing with two different sorts of problems: Nazism and capitalism. And given the greater and more urgent evil of National Socialism, the question became how carefully to treat capitalism, including what was now called state capitalism. Neumann was never a true insider of the Frankfurt School and was criticized internally for lacking a psychological dimension in his thought, as well as a cultural–anthropological dimension, and for being too openly Marxist—in essence, for being too crude. This had a tendency to push Horkheimer away and, to a certain extent, Adorno with him.Footnote ⁶⁸

Interestingly, though, several decades later, in 1968, Adorno returned to the debate in an address to German sociologists, asking whether then-contemporary capitalism should be described as “late capitalism” (retaining the Marxist connotations) or “industrial capitalism” (as a post-Marxist condition, beyond class conflict). His lecture reveals how much had changed in the intervening years. The question was no longer about state capitalism or monopoly capitalism, but rather whether a Marxist lens had any contemporary relevance at all and whether, instead of late-stage capitalism, society had entered a phase of post-political “industrial society” in which class conflict no longer existed and only good economic management was required.

“Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” Adorno asked as the title of his address.Footnote ⁶⁹ The binary choice, Adorno responded, is deceptive. Dialectics were called for. Both labels were correct in some respects, but their contradiction even more enlightening. “Late capitalism” characterizes ongoing relations of production; “industrial society,” the forces of production. And the relations of production remained “damaged, afflicted, and out of kilter,” as they were in late-stage capitalism, because of the industrial forces of production.^{Footnote 70} To fully understand the present economic condition, Adorno wrote, it was essential to see that those damaged relations of production were being hidden beneath the idea that society had supposedly entered into a new phase of industrial society.

In terms of the earlier Pollock–Neumann debate, Adorno in 1968 rejects the idea that there could be a new phase of “state capitalism” because the state has always regulated and played a key role in the maintenance of capitalism. As he writes: “State intervention in the economy is not—as the old school of liberal thinking believed—an extraneous and superfluous imposition, but is essential to the working of the system as a whole.”Footnote ⁷¹ In this sense, he effectively resists Pollock’s position, two decades later.

In this, Adorno underscored the illusion of free markets. The state had always played that role, even in laissez-faire times. The myth of liberal economic thought was just that: a myth all along. “At no time has the capitalist economic model functioned in the way its liberal apologists have claimed,” Adorno stated, “even in its heyday liberalism was not really liberal.”^{Footnote 72} In essence, Adorno argued that state intervention in the economy is what has always oiled the capitalist system, meaning that economics have always been dominated by politics “independent of market mechanisms.”^{Footnote 73} In this, Adorno now sided with Neumann.

But, Adorno argued, Neumann’s position may have derived too tautologically from his definition of a “state”: if indeed National Socialism did not comprise a “state” because it was non-rational, chaotic, and lawless, then of course there could be no “state capitalism” under Nazi Germany—by definition. If, as Adorno suggested, “bourgeois society had always been irrational, unfree, and unjust,” then the statelessness of Nazi Germany may not be unique.Footnote ⁷⁴ Regardless of how he would have positioned himself in 1940, in 1968 Adorno draws our attention acutely to the illusions that maintain capitalism.

Adorno used the clash of nomenclature, then, to unmask the illusions that capitalism rested on free markets and that society had entered a classless condition. It was precisely the illusion of an industrial society in which relations of production are seamless that critical sociologists had to unveil. That was the task of sociology. That was the challenge for sociologists: to unveil illusions. That alone would break their spell. Adorno concluded his essay precisely on that point—on the illusions that must be confronted by sociologists.^{Footnote 75}

Adorno’s intervention represented a radical theory of illusions. In it, paradoxically, Adorno identified one group of resistors who offered perhaps a way out or a path forward. These were the students of 1968—with whom Adorno would have a tense relationship. Here, they offered, in Adorno’s eyes, a source of inspiration. Adorno writes: “In recent years, on the other hand, traces of a counter movement have also become visible, primarily among the most diverse sections of the youth, namely resistance to blind conformism, freedom to opt for rationally chosen goals, disgust with the condition of the world as the hoax and illusion it is, and an awareness of the possibility of change.”^{Footnote 76} Notice how anti-conformist youth counter-movements represent, for Adorno, perhaps the only hope for political change. This is particularly interesting given Adorno’s contentious relationship at the time with his protégé Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the head of the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS).Footnote ⁷⁷

Of Behemoths Today

The reintroduction of the figure of the Behemoth into our bestiary of political economy—from the Pollock–Neumann debate, augmented by Adorno’s 1968 critique—is deeply relevant today. It sheds light on several current developments in political economy. It focuses our attention on the important role of chaos and disorder in contemporary forms of governance.

First, as recent commentators have noted, there is an eerie resemblance between Franz Neumann’s depiction of Nazi Germany in Behemoth and the behaviors of former president Donald J. Trump before and during his presidential mandate (2016–2020). The parallels are striking, and it should not come as a surprise that Trump’s presidency triggered a new round of writings on the Behemoth. Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe, in their essay on “The Supermanagerial Reich” in 2016, use Neumann’s Behemoth and analysis of National Socialism to study the parallel structures, policies, and outcomes of late-stage or Trumpian neoliberalism. Noting of course the numerous stark differences, Chaudhary and Chappe nonetheless use the model of the Behemoth and the debate within the Institute for Social Research to dissect similar neoliberal policies, especially the rise of an elite supermanagerial caste, and argue that supermanagerial governance enabled the rise of authoritarian figures like Trump.Footnote ⁷⁸ Elsewhere, Matthew Sparke and Daniel Bessner write about a “Trumpist Behemoth” in the context of environmental issues. They argue that Neumann’s book serves best to describe the Trumpist Behemoth that attempted to dismantle and rework climate change policy.Footnote ⁷⁹ They too in their work draw on the contrast between a Climate Leviathan and a Climate Behemoth—and add to the mix, as well, a Climate Mao and the Climate X models of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright from their book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bessner and Sparke make the point of connecting the Trumpist Behemoth to neoliberalism, suggesting “a monstrous merging of Nazi and neoliberal tendencies.”Footnote ⁸¹ In the magazine n+1, Andreas Huyssen argues that Donald Trump fits the description of the Nazi Behemoth even better than did National Socialism.Footnote ⁸² Huyssen engages in a creative cut-and-paste to provoke the reader to experience the parallel—replacing the term National Socialism with “Trumpism” in a key passage of Neumann’s book. “Let me conclude with another quote from a Frankfurt School source,” Huyssen wrote:

As Huyssen emphasizes, following the altered quotation:

In an interesting way, the parallel even extends to the reception of the Behemoth argument. Many resisted Neumann’s argument on the grounds that Hitler had a consistent ideology of Aryanism and exterminationist antisemitism. Similarly, many have argued that President Trump had a consistent political ideology underlying a more pragmatic, instrumental, and strategic crust. Scholars, including myself, have tried to reconstruct a coherent ideology subtending Trump’s mode of governing—whether by means of the concept of “fascism,” of “white nationalism,” of “counterrevolution,” or of “internal enemies.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet all of those efforts do not fully capture the intentionally non-rational, opportunistic, and elastic ideology that President Trump projected—the chameleon nature of a reality-TV presidency. Trump did not hesitate to say practically anything or do practically anything that worked—that drew attention, put him in the news cycle, brought in dollars, kept him in power. Trump was determined to be on the front page of the news and trending on Twitter every single day of his presidency. That inevitably created a random assortment of purely instrumental, opportunistic propaganda that blended together those many ideologies of white nationalism and counterinsurgency.

Scholars have been embroiled in a heated debate whether in fact Trump was “fascist”—with Jason Stanley and Federico Finchelstein leading the charge, David Bell and others resisting the temptation, and Samuel Moyn cautiously arbitrating the dispute and getting pulled in different directions.Footnote ⁸⁵ But, on reflection, the long fight over the applicability of the term “fascist” to Trump was almost a distraction from what could have been slightly more enlightening: thinking through the model of the Behemoth. There is a sufficient repertoire of white supremacist and white nationalist history and analysis in the context of American history to not necessarily dip into the discourse of “fascism”; plus, there are probably sufficient differences in the institutional and aesthetic dimensions to avoid using a term that might elide important aspects of Trump’s mode of governing. Franz Neumann’s analysis highlights the irrational aspects of the contradictions within Trump’s discourse—especially, for instance, with regard to claims about “truth” and “fake news”—as well as the element of chaos and disorder that he seemed to thrive on. Neumann was presciently describing Trump’s use of disorder to hold on to power and his unique form of governing through misrepresentation. Moreover, as Neumann had remarked in his case study, President Trump and his associates seemed to be the only ones who did not take his “ideological pronouncements seriously” and were “well aware of their purely propagandistic nature.”^{Footnote 86}

Second, Neumann’s model of the Behemoth sheds light on certain aspects of neoliberalism. Now, the term “neoliberalism” is fraught, as are all denunciatory terms, and it has different meanings depending on intellectual circles. In my previous work, I have tried to carefully define “neoliberalism” as well as its twin “neoliberal penality” as a set of practices, institutions, and discourses that purport to displace politics by extending the myth of orderliness from the economic realm into every other sphere of human existence. I have emphasized how the neoliberal discourse of “deregulation” masks a strengthening of the state in different areas, especially policing, punishing, security, and the punitive society.Footnote ⁸⁷ David Harvey, Quinn Slobodian, Noam Chomsky, and others have also defined the term and its history.Footnote ⁸⁸ Others, such as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, have proposed periodizations of neoliberalism, three in fact. One was an early period of experimentation with US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as the ideas of the Chicago School started to be implemented in rhetoric, practice, and institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A second period of consensus-making occurred at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which led to the “Washington Consensus,” a series of agreed-upon practices and institutions associated with the World Bank and the IMF, and ultimately a belief in the “end of history.” The third, and final, period follows the 2008 crash: a brief moment when people thought it was the end of neoliberalism, a window during which they were prepared to reevaluate and speak in more moralizing terms about the need for social justice; but then gradually there was a return to normal, or if anything, an entrenchment of neoliberal ideas and practices.Footnote ⁸⁹ Here, Phillip Mirowski’s book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, is important. It explains well how neoliberalism consolidated itself and now thrives as we approach the midcentury.Footnote ⁹⁰ The entrenchment of neoliberal practices in the final period has been called “Frankenstein neoliberalism,” to borrow Wendy Brown’s expression.^{Footnote 91}

On my reading, neoliberal discourse uses the concept of the Behemoth as a way to characterize the state in its economic and regulatory functions. In much neoliberal discourse, the state is portrayed as incompetent in economic matters (as opposed to national security and prison matters, and policing); as a result, the state needs to be unplugged and placed out-of-order.Footnote ⁹² When it comes to economic management, by contrast to the orderly and centralized Leviathan state, neoliberalism characterizes the state as a Behemoth. In this sense, neoliberal discourse reflects a will to chaos in government planning, accompanied by a recurring cast of state and non-state actors (e.g., strong political leaders like Reagan or Thatcher; multinationals, the IMF, the World Bank; and proponents of a Washington Consensus). Insofar as it thrives on an apparently disorderly state, it bears a more direct relation to the Behemoth than it does the Leviathan.

In effect, the model of the Behemoth helps identify the will to chaos that is central to neoliberal thought and practice. By rendering the state incompetent in economic affairs, proponents of neoliberalism are able to empower other regulatory actors, such as private corporations, multinationals, international financial institutions, and so on, to extend their Kraken tentacles across the globe.

Third, Neumann’s Behemoth and the Frankfurt School debate over the relationship between capitalism and totalitarianism casts light on the phenomenon of authoritarian neoliberalism, which is by no means new (it plagued the implementation of neoliberalism since its inception in Chile, for example) but continues today. Just as the Marxian framework and predictions about capitalism were challenged by National Socialism, the explanatory matrix of neoliberalism is similarly challenged by the resurgence of authoritarian neoliberalism in its various forms—white nationalist in Trump’s United States, but different in President Erdogan’s Turkey. This raises important questions about how the neoliberal project adjusts or changes when it is tied to explicit “America First” protectionism and nationalism, or how it gets translated in Erdogan’s Turkey or for that matter in President Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China—all important questions today, again having to do with the coupling of authoritarianism and late capitalism. The relevance of the Behemoth could not be timelier. Not surprisingly, the term Behemoth continues to be used in the title of many books. The political theorist Irving Louis Horowitz used it in the title of his work to symbolize “the State on the eve of the twenty-first century,” placing it in in opposition to “Society.”Footnote ⁹³ The historians Joshua B. Freeman and Jehangir Malegam use it in the title of their histories of such diverse topics as, respectively, the factory from New England to Asia and conceptions of peace in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages.Footnote ⁹⁴

Fourth, the Pollock–Neumann–Adorno debates over Neumann’s use of the Behemoth highlight the argument that the term “capitalism” itself may be a misnomer. The state has always been the most important piece of the equation, rather than capital itself. Pollock makes the point by arguing that capitalism had necessarily evolved into state capitalism: he diagnosed National Socialism as totalitarian-run state capitalism and hoped for a democratically run state-controlled economy. Neumann made the argument by suggesting that state totalitarianism was necessarily the end stage of capitalism; he too hoped for a populist, democratically controlled state economy. Adorno made the argument that all forms of capitalism were always state capitalism. All three converge on the argument that capital is not what drives capitalism, it is the state instead—a variant of “it’s the state, stupid.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Fifth, and finally, the Pollock–Neumann–Adorno debates reveal the important discursive work that disorder does. Neumann deployed the figure of the disorderly Behemoth to accentuate the ways in which the Nazi regime was chaotic and lawless. He was not so naïve as to ignore the fact that there were also consistencies and rule-boundness surrounding everything from Nazi antisemitism to aesthetics—a point that Ernst Fraenkel emphasized through his concept of the “dual state” in his eponymous book published in 1941.Footnote ⁹⁶ But Neumann prioritized the disorder in his model to make his argument. This is common. It happens all the time, even today. With the multiple indictments of Trump on charges of electoral interference, sedition, national security violations, tax fraud, and voting manipulation, many Democrats argue that the former president was lawless and must be confronted by the rule of law. On this view, the US Department of Justice and the states of New York and Georgia are the Leviathans fighting against a Trumpian Behemoth. Many Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the rule of law is being weaponized and used as interference in the democratic electoral process. In effect, they are accusing the administration of President Biden of being the lawless Behemoth. In both cases, the accusations of disorder and chaos, of lawlessness, serve an argumentative purpose. They also distract or conceal efforts to restructure society and economy.

The discourses of order and disorder are a potent weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of political economy. Truth is, most often there is both order and disorder in any given situation. There will also be competing interpretations of what constitutes order and disorder. Carl Schmitt saw disorder in the Weimar Republic and order in the Third Reich. Neumann saw the opposite: order in Weimar and disorder in Nazi Germany. But that, of course, is of the essence of order and disorder. They are in the eye of the beholder. The critical rhetorical maneuver is what to highlight, given that order is often more valued than disorder. Successfully portraying a phenomenon as orderly (or disorderly) can not only convince others but also it can serve to mask the reconstructive work that is going on.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the context of neoliberal discourse, for example, claims of disorderliness often serve as a smokescreen that makes possible state reregulation of the economy for the benefit of certain elites.

This is true of Neumann and Pollock as well. They too were deploying the critical maneuver—order and disorder, the Leviathan and the Behemoth—as ways to convince and to mask their ultimate objectives. They were both in precarious positions in exile at Columbia University. The institute itself was on shaky ground. The members had been invited because they were believed to be interdisciplinary social scientists in the German university mold—the model of social science in the singular, the model that gave birth to the University of Chicago’s social science division (recall that, at the University of Chicago, they chiseled off the “s” from the stone on the building that housed the social science division because the masons had incorrectly used the plural).Footnote ⁹⁸ At Columbia, the institute had to play down its earlier Marxist roots—unsuccessfully, ultimately, resulting in its eventual replacement by Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Science. Thomas Wheatland has traced this history well in several articles and a book.^{Footnote 99}

Pollock’s and Neumann’s writings during the period must be read in this light: the people who brought them and the institute to Columbia were anti-communist. Robert Lynd, professor at Columbia, who led the invitations and welcome, was “outspokenly anti-communist” and thought what he was getting was German social science. Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Pollock knew this well. He had been involved in bringing the institute to Columbia. As Wheatland shows, Pollock had been instrumental in getting the institute first to Geneva through his connections at the International Labor Organization, and then played a key role in getting it to Morningside Heights in New York City. Pollock met with Lewis Lorwin (who received his PhD at Columbia and taught there for a while) around 1933 to make contacts, and Lorwin was at the center of those negotiations.^{Footnote 101}

Pollock wrote and published his 1941 article at the height of this sensitive period at Columbia. He had to be extremely careful. On the page, Pollock claimed to be merely raising questions: “Nothing essentially new is intended in this article,” he begins. “Every thought formulated here has found its expression elsewhere.”^{Footnote 102} But, in truth, Pollock was proposing a social-democratic planned economy that effectively abolished capitalism. Pollock outlined a radical transformation of American capitalism that got rid of the “capitalist,” his scare quotes, and turned the capitalist into a “rentier,” again his term.^{Footnote 103} In effect, Pollock was advocating a Soviet-style planned economy controlled instead by a social-democratic people. Pollock had good reason to camouflage what he was saying. Pollock was a student of Soviet planning, he researched and traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and published a book on Soviet planning shortly after 1927.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Now he was trying to integrate into the American academy, and he was writing to predominantly anti-communist American economists from a precarious position in exile at Columbia. He was careful to speak about “democratization” of state capitalism, but the political economy that he sketched in his work was a planned economy controlled by a social-democratic people.

Yet, beneath the more innocuous project, there is a theory about the abolition of capitalism. Pollock is being extremely strategic in this work. He is prefiguring a form of socialism but calling it democratic state capitalism. Under the guise of modesty, and of developing merely a possible model of “democratic state capitalism,” Pollock proposes a radical model that would eliminate capital and get rid of the capitalist. What state capitalism does in eliminating the market and replacing it with centralized control and planning (whether under the control of a totalitarian elite or of the people) is to effectively transform the political economy in such a dramatic way that capital no longer exists or functions in the way it did under market capitalism. In Pollock’s model of “state capitalism,” the state controls the credit system, the banks, money, and, in the process, “capital.” “The state acquires the additional controlling power implied in complete command over money and credit,” Pollock explains. “Every investment, whether it serves replacement or expansion, is subject to plan, and neither oversaving nor overexpansion, neither an ‘investment strike’ nor ‘Fehlinvestitionen’ (poor investments) can create large-scale disturbances.”^{Footnote 105}

The state control of the entire financial system effectively entails an end to capital. In fact, Pollock even puts scare quotes around the term “the ‘capitalist.’”^{Footnote 106} The capitalist, in state capitalism, becomes nothing more than a “rentier”—someone who is getting a rent from his property, and whose rent is stabilized. Pollock writes about the transformation of “the ‘capitalist’” in the following way: “The rigid control of capital, whether in its monetary form or as plant, machinery, commodities, fundamentally transforms the quality of private property in the means of production and its owner, the ‘capitalist.’”^{Footnote 107} The “capitalist” then becomes a rentier:

Pollock goes on to summarize and restate the point: the state takes over the capitalist functions, and as a result the “capitalist” “is reduced to a mere rentier.”^{Footnote 109} In totalitarian state capitalism then, “those owners of capital who are ‘capitalists,’” as he writes, will eventually disappear.^{Footnote 110} They will essentially receive “interest” on their investments, have no social function, and will become surplus population.^{Footnote 111}

The same would have to be true under “democratic” state capitalism—in a planned economy governed by the people. As is clear, Pollock firmly believes in the effectiveness of planned economies. He places himself alongside Oskar Lange and against Hayek—explicitly, in the margin.^{Footnote 112} He says this expressly on a few occasions, the first citing to literature on socialist planning, the second in response to Hayek.^{Footnote 113} Remarkably, whenever Pollock talks about the empirical evidence regarding centralized planning, he refers to evidence from socialist planning.^{Footnote 114} Despite this, perhaps to protect himself, Pollock maintains that his analysis of state capitalism does not apply to the Soviet Union: “It is somewhat doubtful whether our model of state capitalism fits the Soviet Union in its present phase.”^{Footnote 115}

Pollock reviews the arguments against the effectiveness of state capitalism and rejects them all.^{Footnote 116} In fact, Pollock goes one step further and argues that state capitalism does away with economics tout court. “We may even say that under state capitalism economics as a social science has lost its object,” Pollock writes. “Economic problems in the old sense no longer exist when the coordination of all economic activities is effected by conscious plan instead of by the natural laws of the market. Where the economist formerly racked his brain to solve the puzzle of the exchange process, he meets, under state capitalism, with mere problems of administration.”^{Footnote 117} State capitalism becomes mere administration. Economics is replaced by administration.

Franz Neumann by contrast used the rhetoric of the Behemoth instead of the Leviathan, but it too served to soften the blow of a radical economic theory. Here too we need a Straussian sensibility, given that Neumann as well was addressing an anti-communist American audience in a precarious position at the institute at Columbia University. Neumann spoke of a “democratization” of Western capitalism. A process of “democratization” was called for, Neumann wrote. Not easy, given, as Neumann acknowledged, that “it is much more strenuous to develop the potentialities of a nation on a democratic than on an authoritarian basis.”^{Footnote 118} However hard, that was what was necessary because, as noted above, “to uproot National Socialism in the minds of the German people, the model of an efficiently operated democracy will be worth as much as a powerful army.”^{Footnote 119}

In the final paragraph of the book, though, Neumann let show his cards: “The flaws and breaks in the system and even the military defeat of Germany will not lead to an automatic collapse of the regime. It can only be overthrown by conscious political action of the oppressed masses, which will utilize the breaks in the system.”^{Footnote 120} Only “the oppressed masses,” and them alone, could tear down and defeat totalitarian monopoly capitalism.

Fortunately for him, Neumann’s Marxism was sufficiently masked behind his righteous indignation against Nazism that he would be well received at Columbia, where he was appointed to teach political science, and at the OSS where he participated in the psychological warfare programs that he had outlined in Behemoth. The paradox has not escaped scholars. As the historians of the Frankfurt School have emphasized, Neumann was more rigidly Marxist than Horkheimer or Adorno (at least on their view), which was one of the reasons that they distanced themselves slightly from his positions. Yet Neumann’s book was more favorably received by American scholars than any of the other works of the institute, landing Neumann, and Neumann alone, that teaching position at Columbia and a key position in the OSS. The Marxist dimensions of his work—the argument that late or monopoly capitalism necessarily required a totalitarian state to uphold it—did not register, as much as his righteous indignation against the lawless, irrational, nonstate of Nazi Germany and his arguments about propaganda and psychological warfare.

In the end, both Pollock and Neumann offered prescriptions that effectively abolished capitalism. Neither was fully expressed or transparent, hidden behind the language of democratic theory and the metaphors of Leviathans and Behemoths.