“Has Germany a Political Theory? Is Germany a State?” The Foreign Affairs of Nations in the Political Thought of Franz L. Neumann

Abstract

Some two years before his early accidental death in 1954, Franz L. Neumann characterised himself as a “political scholar”. During his young adult years in Germany, he had been a practising labour lawyer whose writings stayed close to technical questions about that law, as well as to broader issues about the place of labour in the German democratic constitutional scheme. In 1933, Neumann fled to England. His first years in exile were devoted to a second doctoral dissertation on the political theory of law, as well as to political writings on the defeat of the Weimar regime and the rise of National Socialism. After four years in England, Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he was first a research scholar and planner at the Institute for Social Research, then an official engaged in intelligence analysis in American government service, and finally a professor of political studies at Columbia University. Yet, Neumann’s self-identification with the more general class of intellectuals was intended not simply to bypass the need to specify a vocational category but, rather, to refer both to his subject matter and to an obligation. As Neumann uses the designation “political scholar”, he deliberately conflates the senses of the scholar who studies politics and the scholar who is political. Neumann (1961: 13) defines political scholars, first, as “those intellectuals dealing with problems of state and society … 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”.¹