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Chapter 10 - Denazification and Postwar German Philosophy: The Marcuse/Heidegger Correspondence
- Edited by David Kettler, Detlef Garz
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- First Letters after Exile by Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, and Others
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- Anthem Press
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- 25 February 2022
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- 10 March 2021, pp 153-160
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Summary
On August 28, 1947, Herbert Marcuse initiated a brief epistolary exchange with his former teacher Martin Heidegger. Marcuse had met in person with Heidegger earlier in the summer at Heidegger's Black Forest retreat on Todtnauberg. Atop Heidegger's Magic Mountain, Marcuse articulated the thoughts and sentiments of numerous exiles. He demanded that Heidegger explain his utterances and actions during the Third Reich. Heidegger refused to grant Marcuse's wishes, and the latter returned to the United States with unfinished business. Recording his thoughts for his associates and posterity, Marcuse tried one last time to seek an explanation. Heidegger responded with a letter of his own that is chilling and prophetic in its formulation of rationalizations and justifications that would later become common in West Germany. Examined together, this brief exchange of letters presents a vivid case study of the predicaments and perspectives of the exiles, as well as the presumptions and attitudes toward the exiles that were held by many of those who stayed behind. Although Marcuse had been studying the phenomenon of Nazism as both a member of the Frankfurt School and as a research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, Heidegger represented a concrete encounter with National Socialism—and as a former teacher, Heidegger also presented Marcuse with an opportunity to grapple with his own intellectual history.
While Marcuse was not the only former student to pose such questions to Martin Heidegger, Marcuse's letters are notable because of their directness. Marcuse was not an intimate of Heidegger, nor was he a favorite student—and yet his letters confront and challenge Heidegger in a manner that is extremely personal and sadly a bit unusual among Heidegger's former students. Although Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers confided in each other that they feared that Heidegger had not only erred but also perhaps lost his mind (and remained misguided and unrepentant to the end), both actively contributed not only to the postwar rehabilitation of Heidegger but also to the expansion of his intellectual legacy. Marcuse, on the other hand, confronted his mentor and demanded explanations—but Marcuse's motives during his encounter with Heidegger were as complicated and perhaps as calculated as those of Arendt and Jaspers.
Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich: Baron, Popper, Strauss, Auerbach. By David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 307. Paper $31.99. ISBN 978-1108704984.
- Thomas Wheatland
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- Journal:
- Central European History / Volume 53 / Issue 1 / March 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 March 2020, pp. 267-269
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- March 2020
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Chapter 9 - Franz Neumann in Washington: The Political Intellectual at War
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 329-368
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Summary
Neumann Comes to the Office of Strategic Services
Franz L. Neumann commenced full- time work with the US government on February 22, 1943, thereby dedicating himself fully to the official war effort against Nazi Germany. Although he had already divided his time between the Institute for Social Research and the US Board of Economic Warfare through the summer and fall of 1942, his outright termination by Max Horkheimer and Frederick Pollock at the end of 1942 led him into more direct and permanent employment with the US government. While it would be tempting to see this move from scholarly research to the official war effort as a moment in which Neumann voluntarily recommitted himself to a more activist role as a political intellectual, his choice of public employment presents a more complex picture. Although Neumann had always been one of the most explicitly political intellectuals in the nominally nonaligned Institute, he went to extraordinary lengths to preserve his research- centered job at the Institute, notwithstanding the political discretion it required. He only made his move to Washington after his position with Max Horkheimer had become no longer negotiable and thus impossible. Therefore, the decision to enter fulltime government service, where his political effectiveness could well be subject to more formal limitations, was made in important part because more desirable options had been foreclosed. In a sense, the leaders of the Institute made the decision for him.
Confronted with no other attractive professional opportunities, he followed up on overtures to join the Office for Strategic Services (hereafter referred to as OSS) made by Walter Dorn and Eugene Anderson, academic historians he'd come to know during his Institute years and who had been drawn earlier into government service. This would allow him to continue with the people who had joined him during his last years working on the Institute's failed grant proposals on Nazi Germany.
Neumann had made himself the natural candidate for an OSS leadership role, because he had then separately begun a book project under contract with Oxford University Press entitled “National Socialism and European Reconstruction.” By the end of 1940, Neumann's role with the Institute's Germany project had also led to his collaboration and friendship with Eugene Anderson, who would later become Neumann's supervisor at OSS.
Frontmatter
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp i-iv
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Conclusion
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 467-468
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Summary
In the spring of 1954, Franz Neumann advised the older of the present authors to abandon a grandiose dissertation project on numerous writers attacked by Karl Popper as “historicists” and to limit his study to the little- known Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Ferguson, who is occasionally classed with this tendency. It was not until many years later that the point of the assignment became altogether clear. Ferguson had to be understood as a writer in two distinct modes. He was an unoriginal moral philosopher in the Common Sense school designed to counter David Hume's skeptical philosophy, but he was also a teacher and commentator who viewed social and political designs from the standpoint not of the “spectator” but of the “actor.” It was in the latter capacity that he projected a scheme of strategic norms for conflict- ridden historical phases rather than abstract moral maxims based on universal laws of human nature to provide orientation for active participants in social and political actions. The commercial society, he thought, precluded civic virtue in the classical sense, but it opened a range of other ethically meaningful choices and set a menu of weighty political alternatives. His master was Montesquieu. Yet, since he was a contemporary of Adam Smith, he offered a more complex reading of the modern social structure, with special emphasis on the division of labor as a critical irremovable factor, a refinement for which he was acknowledged by Karl Marx. Neumann's Marx is above all the Marx of the political journalism, Marx as public teacher. That is, we think, what it means to be a public intellectual. We have followed Neumann quite closely through his years of political study and intervention, acknowledging his evasions, errors and perplexities because we think practical political understanding entails such risks and because we think also that his career exemplifies the highest standards of such an undertaking, due ultimately to his deep respect for evidence and his openness to instruction through experience as well as the thoughts of others. The greatest tribute to Franz Neumann is that there cannot be a “Neumann school” as there is a school— to remain within his generation of exile scholars— of Leo Strauss and Hanna Arendt. Thinkers like Franz Neumann are not authorities to be accepted or denied: they are intellectuals to be reckoned with, even some generations later.
Learning from Franz L. Neumann
- Law, Theory, and the Brute Facts of Political Life
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 September 2019
- Print publication:
- 26 July 2019
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A labor lawyer and publicist of weight in the Weimar Republic, Franz Neumann devoted his 21-year exile, after 1933, to understanding the failure of arrangements supposed to be in the line of social progress. He sought to delineate a new conception of democracy as a vehicle of social change. "Learning from Franz Neumann" examines Neumann's social and political theory in the context of his career as a practitioner, learner, and teacher.
Chapter 7 - No Happy End: Unprofitable Negotiations
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 231-248
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Summary
Anti- Fascism in America: Paul Tillich's 1938 Theses
Franz Neumann's need to gain a measure of recognition in his exceptional and exceptionally demanding American locale of exile— especially in view of the barriers to much of America that were the price of the opportunities offered by Horkheimer's Institute of Social Research— to earn a livelihood for himself and his family, to assemble sufficient bargaining power to solidify and to renegotiate his deal and yet also to pursue his own political and intellectual designs— made for a time of strain and difficulty. This is documented in the record of his own work during the six years between his arrival in New York and his departure for Washington as well as in the internal records of the Institute. In an important sense, however, Neumann's characterization of himself as a “political intellectual” captures the continuities amid the diversions, distractions and duties that absorbed so much of his energy. And the conjoint missions of understanding, explaining and resisting the Hitler regime in Germany remained at the center. And there was never enough, if only because he was never satisfied with being a member of a team. He felt a distinctly personal responsibility as theorist, analyst and advocate.
The central questions for him were political, not philosophical, jurisprudential or social scientific, as such, although the question of what was to count as political, both in subject matter and practical engagement, involved those fields of inquiry. We have little evidence of Neumann's active engagement in the political efforts of the inwardly divided exile groupings after his arrival in New York, and what little we have is predictably ambiguous, as to the extent to which he was acting primarily as agent for the Institute. The best- documented instance turns on a set of theses on “the political and spiritual tasks of the German emigration” circulated by Paul Tillich in 1938 among representative exile intellectuals, ranging from Thomas Mann to leading figures at the New School. Although it was Max Horkheimer who was on the distribution list, it was Neumann who suggested some changes to Tillich, in his own name, and he also evidently prepared points for discussion at the Institute, as did Herbert Marcuse.
Index
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 469-502
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Chapter 11 - The Legacy: Four Studies
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 431-466
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Summary
Political Power
Neumann's article on political power presents itself as a mere survey of approaches to the topic “for younger students,” rather than a new theory, although the conjunction with the ambitious statement on freedom in the sequel calls this modest description into question. The character of the enterprise is better seen through Neumann's initial footnote, attached to the curt statement, “Political power is an elusive concept.” Neumann quotes a passage from Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning. Bacon built on a passage from Virgil to identify power with the force that “is diffused throughout the living parts of nature [and] activates the whole mass.” The Bacon passage goes on to decry the futility of rebellion: the ruled need/ cannot know about government, but the rulers must know everything about the governed, Bacon maintains. As will be seen later, Neumann counters this inference from the inescapability of power with a different calculus, which is not, however, offered as a refutation.
In his development of the concept of political power, Neumann surprisingly asserts that it “embraces […] control over nature [as well as] control over man,” although he quickly adds that the former is a “mere intellectual power,” serving productivity through knowledge of nature's laws, as well obedience to them, drawing once again on Bacon. Unlike this “powerless power,” political power in the narrower sense is “control over men.” In a more detailed characterization, however, Neumann explains, “Political power is social power focused on the state. It involves control of other men for the purpose of influencing the behavior of the state, its legislative, administrative and social activities.” And such control, according to Neumann, differs fundamentally from power over nature inasmuch as both parties in political power relations have the capacity for voluntary actions, even if the capacity for rational choice, as is normally the case, is not activated in the one subjected to control:
Consequently, those who wield political power are compelled to create emotional and rational responses in those whom they rule, inducing them to accept, implicitly or explicitly, the commands of the rulers. (162)
Neumann then expands on this formula to include relations of “simple violence, ultimately to liquidation” among the modalities of the power interplay. The somewhat curious notion that control can be secured through liquidation is made less mysterious as Neumann develops his analysis.
Chapter 1 - The Challenge of Franz L. Neumann
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 1-8
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Franz L. Neumann was a twentieth- century political thinker compelled to address central issues of democratic political understanding that have unexpectedly returned to prominence in recent years. Above all, there are patterns of threat to the convergence of pluralist social formations and adaptive constitutional orders that appeared securely established in the predominant array of states, notably the rise of authoritarian political leaders able to secure recognition from constituencies comprised of disillusioned publics and interested centers of power. It is understandable, then, that some attention has turned to the generation of thinkers that encountered fascist rule in its various embodiments in the twentieth century, especially the classical— and worst— instance of National Socialist rule in Germany, notable among other examples of the time in that it displaced a troubled but working democracy. Much of the discussion of those cases segued into a more inclusive examination of “totalitarianism,” designed to comprehend the Soviet state as well, which shifted attention from key issues of democratic theory, notably the use of such key democratic institutions as universal suffrage to destroy democracy. Yet, that is precisely the form taken by present- day threats.
That class of questions could not be neglected by the generation of political exiles who had played an active role in the struggles of Weimar, among whom Franz Neumann was certainly the best recognized, notably after the publication of Behemoth during the course of the Second World War. Although he was never a Marxist in his political theory of the democratic state, his recourse to social analyses he learned from Marxists made it easy to put him aside in the postwar years, especially in view of his silencing by an early death. Alternatively, he could be referred to the rather amorphous entity called the “Frankfurt School,” in the light of his years of employment in Max Horkheimer's New York Institute, and then dismissed as a lesser thinker by the scholars focused on this tendency precisely because he insisted on a political and social frame of analysis centered on issues of power and law. He certainly learned from his dealings with the Institute, but he worked as an independent scholar, as well as contributing important effort to collective ventures, as mandated by his position as a senior- level research associate. Behemoth, in fact, was expressly written outside of the terms of reference and discipline of the Institute.
Chapter 6 - Neumann's Second Exile: Negotiating the Politics of Research
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 203-230
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Neumann's Contested Place
For most people familiar with Critical Theory, Franz Neumann is typically seen as a minor player in a complex institutional and intellectual drama. Unlike the core members of Max Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research in its New York exile years, Neumann did not engage in philosophical inquiries. In his work as legal and political thinker, he focused on the political implications of philosophical designs he found generally sympathetic, while maintaining some skeptical distance from the foundational work. This pattern was already manifest in his first dissertation, where he expressly addresses the question of relations between philosophical and other levels of inquiry into legal issues. He was also a relative latecomer to the Institute who did not fit comfortably within its intellectual orbit around the Frankfurt School's director, Max Horkheimer— and there is no question that Neumann's experiences and commitments to working- class political movements were out of step with the Frankfurt School's abandonment of the proletariat as the primary agent of revolutionary social change. More broadly, Horkheimer and his most intimate group did not recognize the distinct problems of political theory as bearing philosophical weight. This is not to say, however, as some have assumed, that Neumann's intellectual contributions to the Critical Theory enterprise were not substantial. Rather, it points to the fact that Neumann was underutilized and underappreciated by Horkheimer and his administrative right- hand man, Friedrich Pollock, during the years of Neumann's brief collaborations with them. The working agreements that governed their relations were shallower than they needed to be if they had been able to communicate more reciprocally about the limits of their respective domains. Nevertheless, the interactions, however flawed, were productive for the Institute, especially in the longer term.
The view of Neumann as peripheral to the Institute of Social Research, taken as the home of the “Frankfurt School,” is a reasonable conclusion from Neumann's inability to engage in sustained research on his own distinctive questions under the auspices of the Institute, as his distinctive research projects were not supported.
Chapter 8 - Behemoth: Wars Can Be Lost
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 249-328
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Leviathan and Behemoth
Franz Neumann was probably the only member of the Institute for Social Research in New York who had been an active partisan of the defeated political forces that shaped the Weimar Republic and who sought to uphold it to the end. Unlike the others, thus, he did not have the luxury of portraying the rise of Hitler as strictly a function of social and cultural forces that he had always resisted. His angry critique in exile of labor's Weimar policies almost always entailed— more or less openly— self- criticism as well. As we have seen, this was at times quite explicit, as when speaking in the name of Leopold Franz, he denounced Franz Neumann's illusions about the state. But that was done in a context in which the reader was left free to believe that the writer thought that a comprehensive socialist revolution had been an alternative available in 1918. When Neumann goes to Hobbes for the ultimate disjunction between “Leviathan” and “Behemoth,” however, he is gauging a more elemental loss and, perhaps, a more shameful defeat. After all, the disaster epitomized for Hobbes by the ouster and execution of Charles I had to do with the loss of the sovereign state whose necessity and feasibility Hobbes had shown in Leviathan, and the prime causes, as set forth in his Behemoth, had all to do with the confusion brought about by the schemes and claims of reformers, political as well as religious.
Hobbes played a number of different roles in Neumann's earlier work, including a striking claim in his LSE dissertation: “Our fundamental thesis, that the introduction of the postulate of the rule of material law and of a rational and secular justification of the state necessarily leads to revolutionary consequences, can be demonstrated in Hobbes's system very clearly” (100). But that is clearly not what Neumann wants to convey with the juxtaposition of the two paradigms that he takes from Hobbes's best- known books. With Rousseau and Hegel— and Montesquieu as a later addition— Hobbes provides Neumann with the constituents of a rational theory of the state, with his own unfinished constructive work dedicated to working out the gaps and conflicts among them. Marx hovers authoritatively in the background, much of the time, but he needs to be complemented by a political theory.
Chapter 5 - After Weimar: The First Exile
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 95-202
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Overview of Neumann's Writings in England, 1933– 36
If Franz Neumann's writings until the moment of exile almost all comprised legal advocacy in design as well as purpose, given the address of his commentaries as well to intellectuals, his most important exile writings were either more directly political or academic in manner. Although his decision to attend the London School of Economics (LSE) is clearly congruent with such a change in emphasis, nothing is known about the process by which Neumann came to enroll in a doctoral program focused on political theory rather than seeking to requalify himself for legal practice, as was done by his close associates, Otto Kahn- Freund and Ernst Fraenkel. It seems likely, however, that Harold J. Laski, who was to supervise Neumann's dissertation was an important factor. In the early days of Neumann's arrival in London, Laski was the sponsor and doubtless also the authority addressed in two quite different writings on the end of Weimar (and beyond).
Like Laski himself, Neumann also published some openly political writings in the exile Socialist press during his four years in England, taking a strong position on several of the issues most contested within the Socialist political emigration, which entailed, in turn, a controversial stand on the Socialist and trade- union politics of the Weimar years. His politics in those writings were “Left”— and thus critical of the majority in the Social Democratic exile organization— very much in the manner of the Neue Beginnen group, which had broken away from the party, although there is no evidence available of direct contacts with the group as such, which became somewhat influential among English émigré and labor groups only after his departure. Although tempting at times, and made more plausible by the positions taken by some of the non- Communist delegates to the mid- 1930s sequence of meetings in Paris, it would not be on balance accurate to identify his position with an opening to the Popular Front, which was an important political issue on the continent at the time. Neumann's focus remains on the trade unions and not on the political parties. After 1936, there is never again a piece of political advocacy of this frankly partisan type. And all we have by way of explanation is his remark in the exile lecture that he became convinced that there would be no revolution from within Germany.
Chapter 3 - Power, Resistance and Constitutions
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 45-82
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Resistance can suspend co- operation, or make it defective. The forms of resistance […] may hinder, interrupt, or threaten to destroy a system of co- operation. […] The general purpose of all kinds of resistance is to reestablish a favorable situation.
E. V. WalterThe Rise of Cartels
As Hans Mommsen effectively summarizes a complex story, the most important political developments of the economic recovery years during the mid- 1920s took the form of an “extra- parliamentary offensive” against the complex of policies that had been part of the social settlement signaled by the Weimar Constitution and the ensuing governing coalitions, with the highly symbolic issue of the limitation of the working day prominent among the policies under immediate attack and with the supports of the collective bargaining regime as a whole clearly in prospect as targets. The prime agents of employer action were newly strengthened patterns of business organization, ranging from cartels that interlinked enterprises with regard to certain of their functions to trusts that brought key sectors under ever more unified control, all tending toward effective monopoly in the markets, whether or not the ownerships were in fact fully joined. After the economic collapse of 1930, the resistance to a regime hospitable to unions gained effective power, and the task of resistance shifted to the unions and their political supporters. The young Franz Neumann— still in his twenties, it should be recalled— figured as an important voice in both phases. The challenge of the cartels arises first in the minutes of the executive committee of the principal trade union formation in 1925 and 1926, not directly in relation to changed power configurations in bargaining but rather with regard to the change in the capacity to resist and undermine public economic policy, as it affects prices, industrial rationalization and foreign trade, during the period of recovery from hyperinflation. Yet, by the end of 1928, Neumann's introduction of the theme into his analysis of the Ruhr struggle exceptionally put the immediate issue in the context of the shifting power relations in collective bargaining. It followed major joint submissions along the old lines to Chancellor Marx by the Social Democratic unions earlier in the year, an authoritative policy prospectus called “Economic Democracy” published by a leading labor intellectual, Fritz Naphtali, and subsequently adopted by the union federation as its program5 as well as two important earlier interventions by Neumann himself.
Chapter 4 - Franz Neumann's Commemoration of Exile
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 83-94
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Neumann's departure from Berlin in 1933 was by no means the end of his engagement in the overwhelming events of his time. After four years in England, his exile took him to the United States, where he lived until his death by road accident in 1954. To characterize this period, we shall draw on Neumann's own retrospective view, written a year or so before his death and expressly designed to put more emphasis on his American years than on the initial stay in Britain. Still, at this critical break in Neumann's unfinished project, we shall follow him regarding the rise of Hitler to power as a pivotal moment that sharply bisects his intellectual life, although we will take distance from his dismissive view of the earlier period as nothing but prelude. These distortions will require some attention, but in a retrospective examination of the role of social scientists exiled from Nazi Germany written not long before his premature death, Neumann himself proposes a characterization of his own vocation that lets us think less disjointedly about him than is usually done, without reducing his path to a mere artifact of his unique biography. Neumann's occasional piece, a contribution to a collection that was oddly entitled The Cultural Migration by its American editor— as if the persons under discussion were suddenly all struck by wanderlust in 1933— is also a good introduction to his late intellectual style; and we shall therefore review it in some detail, with occasional comments to mark distinctive features of his way of proceeding.
The key concept that Neumann uses for his own kind, accordingly, is “political scholars,” deliberately conflating the senses of the scholar who studies politics and the scholar who is political. Using a more generic term, Neumann defines political scholars, first, as “those intellectuals dealing with problems of state and society— historians, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists— who were— or should have been— compelled to deal with the brute facts of politics”; and, second, as intellectuals who “being political […] fought— or should have fought— actively for a better, more decent political system.” Neumann's explication of this concept— at once normative and descriptive— is a prime motif in his historical approach to the problem of intellectuals in exile, which he offers as context for a consideration of his own cohort of emigrants.
Chapter 10 - Franz Neumann in the University: La guerre est finie
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Book:
- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 369-430
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The author [of the book under review] drew the consequences of withdrawing from political participation. A political activist may regret this decision […] In the present situation he may, however, be right. There are historical situations where an individual, no matter how honest, intelligent and courageous, is quite powerless to affect the course of history.
Franz L. Neumann (1952)American Policy for Postwar Germany: Analysis and Advocacy
If it is the measure of political intellectuals that their professional and academic work always contained an orientation to practice in the political sphere, as noted earlier, Neumann's functioning in this capacity in the postwar years involved a narrowing of the relevant domain to the locus of political education. His practical energies and skills were primarily invested in the reshaping of political studies at Columbia University, in the non- Communist university project in Berlin, and in the institutionalized political science discipline in the United States. Underlying this aspect of his activities was his political judgment that, in the end, the raising of a generation of politically aware young people held more promise than investing in the resurrection of the labor movement. As with many matters, Neumann was close in this to his friend, Herbert Marcuse, who embodied this project in the decades after Neumann's death, albeit in a style that Neumann would never have essayed.
Like Marcuse, however, he also sought to bring his wartime experience to bear on elite discussions about American policy toward Germany and the Soviet Union. In August 1946, Neumann prepared a research proposal entitled “The Buffer Society,” whose intended recipient— presumably a funding source— is not known, although he sent a copy with his regards to Max Horkheimer. The objective he poses is to help the United States to cooperate with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union to maintain peace, in the full sense of that term. He begins by noting the “structural differences” between the Western powers and the Soviets, schematically reviewing all the dimensions he had covered in Behemoth and by postulating that they are all of “vital importance in international relations.” Neumann observes that each of the countries “strives to create a sphere of exclusive influence in order to strengthen its security,” but that there are also a number of countries under the postwar control of some multipartite commission, with varying degrees of influence by one or the other partner.
Chapter 2 - Social Constitution, Social Power and Responsibility: Neumann and Labor Advocacy
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp 9-44
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Marxism and Law
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.” 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. If all political exiles, in the full sense of the word, have been active in some public space before their displacement, a distinct location must be reserved for figures like Neumann, whose adult years before exile were so profoundly engaged in the preeminent project of the place from which he was banished. In such cases, the activities of exile cannot be understood without close attention to the earlier enterprise.
According to the second of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, “Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this- sidedness of his thinking, in practice” (229). This familiar quotation from the author who was the subject of one of Neumann's last semester- long seminars at Columbia and whose theoretical contributions he promoted with surprising enthusiasm there in the McCarthyite Spring of 1953 may be read as a gloss on Neumann's resolution to deal, as a political intellectual, with the “brute realities of politics” while fighting “for a better political system.” The great and continuing strength of Neumann's work as achievement and model is its alertness, despite the profound importance he attaches to the great theoretical structures of rational political thought, to the distracting evidence of discordant developments in the practical world, as encountered in his practical projects. Neither in his legal nor in his political analyses was he prepared to reify the broad designs or general trends that figure in theory— not even in the theory he valued the most.
Contents
- David Kettler, Thomas Wheatland
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- Learning from Franz L. Neumann
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- 06 September 2019
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- 26 July 2019, pp v-viii
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Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. By Matthew G. Specter. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xii + 263. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-0521488037. Paper $24.99. ISBN 978-0521738316.
- Thomas Wheatland
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- Central European History / Volume 45 / Issue 1 / March 2012
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- 08 March 2012, pp. 169-172
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- March 2012
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Repeated re-use of sea water as a medium for the functioning and self-cleansing of molluscan shellfish
- L. A. Allen, G. Thomas, M. C. C. Thomas, A. B. Wheatland, H. N. Thomas, E. E. Jones, J. Hudson, H. P. Sherwood
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- Journal of Hygiene / Volume 48 / Issue 4 / December 1950
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- 15 May 2009, pp. 431-457
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When mussels are allowed to function in sea water the main changes occurring in the water are depletion of dissolved oxygen and lowering of pH value. Provided the faeces and pseudo-faeces are not disturbed the increase in the content of organic matter is not appreciable. If the supernatant water is removed and aerated with diffused air the water is re-oxygenated, the pH value is restored to its original level, and the water so treated may be re-used for immersing a fresh batch of mussels. The process of re-use may apparently be continued indefinitely.
Under these conditions a high degree of cleansing is achieved by the mussels, the count of coli-aerogenes bacteria being reduced to a small fraction of the original; counts of bacteria in the water, on the other hand, are subject to large fluctuations. It was considered advisable for this reason to chlorinate the water between each cycle of cleansing in order to immerse the mussels on each occasion in water which itself was reasonably certain to be free from coliform bacteria, potentially including pathogens.
Experience showed that the greatest difficulty involved in the use of chlorine was in removing residual chlorine so that it would not inhibit functioning of the mussels when the water was re-used. After trials of various alternatives it was concluded that the most satisfactory method was to determine by means of small-scale tests the smallest quantity of chlorine (below the break-point) required to give a residual concentration of 0·05–0·10 p.p.m. in the re-used water and then to add the corresponding quantity with precision to the bulk of water by means of a dosing apparatus while the water was being pumped from the mussel tank to the aeration tank. After a period of contact of 1 hr. the water was aerated for a further hour. A series of trials in a semll-scale plant showed that this treatment ensured that residual chlorine in the water being added to the mussels did not exceed 0·05 p.p.m.; as a result the mussels functioned satisfactorily and the degree of cleansing attained was comparable with that attained in the existing mussel-cleansing tanks in which sterilized fresh sea water is used for each cycle of cleansing. Although the concentration of residual chlorine was small the mussels kept the water so clear that this concentration was effectively bactericidal and the bacterial quality of the water was usually comparable with that of good drinking water. Low temperatures retard the metabolic activity of mussels and below 4° C. this is so marked that the degree of cleansing achieved is unsatisfactory. For this reason it is recommended that the temperature of the re-used water should be maintained at 6° C. (43° F.) or above.
Oysters were found to be satisfactorily cleansed by a process of re-use similar to that adopted for mussels, provided the temperature of the water was maintained at 54° F. (12·2° C.) or rather higher.
Small-scale trials showed that artificial sea water, prepared by dissolving in fresh water suitable quantities of the major constituents of natural sea water, could be successfully re-used for cleansing mussels.