Translating Max Weber

Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political
Science

Peter Breiner

State University of New York at Albany

a b s t r a c t : Although it is well-recognized that Max Weber was of central
importance to many of the emigre social scientists who fled Hitler, commentators
have overlooked both Weber’s attempt to found a new dynamic political science that
would test partisan commitments and the endeavors of emigre political scientists to
develop this project. This article lays out this new Weberian political science and
assesses the fate of the various attempts on the part of the emigres to translate it into
their new setting. It shows that Weber forged a notion of political science that
combined an existential notion of politics as inexorable power struggle with a
sociology of the business of politics that provided the setting in which that struggle
was to take place. It also shows that the central purpose of this political science was to
aid political partisans in clarifying the meaning of their political commitments by
forcing them to view these commitments as they are shaped in the socio-political
context that determines the struggle for power. I then show that Mannheim sought to
radicalize this approach to political science by seeking to construct the political
backdrop for the testing of political ideas out of a political field not out of parties,
politicians, and state institutions but out of competing ideologies, each of which could
be shown to have some insight into the dynamics of political conflict. For Mannheim
we could now test political ideas against political reality by playing them off against
each other. I call this project of testing political ideas against existential and
sociological notions of the political field the Weber–Mannheim project. I then show
how three emigre political scientists – Arnold Brecht, Hans Morgenthau, and Franz
Neumann – sought to carry on the Weber–Mannheim project in their new setting. I
argue that, of the three, Franz Neumann in his great work Behemoth, was most
successful in staying true to that project. For he was able to find in his analysis of the
Weimar Republic and the fascist regime a way of demonstrating the dynamics under
which democracy and dictatorship fail or succeed while still maintaining openings for
political will. Both Brecht and Morgenthau seem to have flattened the dynamic aspect
of the Weberian and Mannheimian notions of a prudential political science – though
it was Morgenthau who had the most successful reception in political science.

k e y w o r d s : Brecht, emigre political scientists, Mannheim, Morgenthau, Neumann,
political sociology, Weber

133

a r t i c l e

Contact address: Peter Breiner, Department of Political Science, Milne 100,
State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222, USA.
Email: [e-mail]

EJPT

European Journal
of Political Theory

© SAGE Publications Ltd,

London, Thousand Oaks

and New Delhi

issn 1474-8851, 3(2) 133–149

[DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041043]

EPT 3/2 articles 2/26/04 1:35 PM Page 133

It would hardly be worth a paper to demonstrate that many of the German-
speaking intellectuals who fled to England and the United States carried an
understanding of Max Weber with them into their new setting. The fact is too
obvious. It is less obvious that there were several elements of Weber that the
emigres took with them into their new setting, only some of which they were able
to translate into the social scientific vocabulary of their hosts. The most typical
version of Weber that many of the emigres embraced was his famous rationaliza-
tion and disenchantment thesis. This thesis was used largely to develop a cultural
critique of modernity in the West in general and the United States in particular.
A less typical but equally noteworthy version represented by a number of politi-
cal economists sought to translate Weber’s emphasis on the institutional and
cultural basis for economic conduct into a setting in which formal modelling was
the dominant form of discourse. This mode of analysis found its expression in the
works of economists like Adolph Lowe at The New School, who examined the
political backdrop for theories of the market and market intervention.

1

However,

there is a third version of Weber that also circulated among some emigres that,
although of great significance for the study of politics, never quite flourished in its
new setting either in Britain or the US. This version was based on Weber’s politi-
cal sociology and his larger project of using his ideal-typical political sociology to
provide a kind of prudential clarification for political actors of all partisan persua-
sions as to the meaning and significance of their political commitments. It is the
fate of this version that I wish to examine here.

The Problem of Translation

In a sense, the intellectual problem the German and Austrian refugees faced was
one of translation. Literally, as Lewis Coser points out, many of the academic
sociologists among the emigres, spent much of their careers translating the great
works of Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim into English so that generations of
students would get to know these works.

2

More figuratively, both sociologists and

political scientists faced the problem of finding an idiom in which to translate the
Weber-inspired concept of political sociology into the pragmatic and relatively
atheoretical academic idiom of US social science. Weber’s political sociology and
his project of using it to provide self-clarification for political actors proved to be
uniquely difficult to translate into this new setting. In part this had to do with
translation in the first sense, namely that the Weber of the political writings was
hardly known in the United States.

3

However, the major obstacle was translation

in the second sense. For the project of using political sociology to provide self-
clarification to politically located and partisan actors depended on a setting in
which a wide range of partisan positions and intense partisan conflict were central
to political life. Not only was the arena of partisan conflict narrow in the new
English and American settings, but fascism had effaced the very arena of partisan
politics with which the emigres had been so familiar, that of Weimar. More

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problematic yet, this approach to what would be called ‘political science’ in
America had been specifically developed as an attempt to break with the German
tradition of ‘Staatsrecht’ by which political inquiry was seen as a branch of public
law.

4

Although it had influenced the early 20

th

-century formation of political

science in the United States, this tradition with its debate between natural law,
positive law, and the new existential approach to law had no correlate in the
American setting of the 1940s and beyond. And to this has to be added the prag-
matic and institutional approach to politics typical of American political dis-
course.

5

The problem, then, for those emigres who had seen in Weber a kind of

sociological theory of political judgment was how to make such a project intelli-
gible in a place where it had no clear resonance and in a historical moment when
fascism seemed to have ended any notion of political clarification of historical
alternatives. It was Karl Mannheim who had most fruitfully addressed this side
of Weber in Weimar, but he was unable to solve the problem in exile. Other
emigres took it further. I will call the unfulfilled development of a Weberian
political science ‘the Weber–Mannheim project’.

The Weber–Mannheim Project

The Weber–Mannheim project emerges from Max Weber’s attempt to forge a
prudential political science by tying an existential notion of political conflict to a
political sociology of modern politics. On the existential side, Weber and those
who follow his approach, notably Karl Mannheim and Carl Schmitt, claim that
all politics involves an inexorable struggle for power. Whether for the sake of
prestige or for the achievement of other aims, politics is always ‘a striving after a
share of power or influencing the distribution of power’.

6

And power always

means imposing your will over the resistance of others.

7

This existential notion is,

however, sociologically embedded in a series of ideal-typical accounts of con-
verging and conflicting developmental tendencies that come to form economic
institutions, parties, states, parliaments, and political actors. The particular con-
stellation of political structures formed by these interlocking developments pro-
vides the setting for the struggle for political power. Political commitments must
be tested for their ability to survive the distinctive demands that this background
imposes on political actors. Thus, for Weber, all political ideas need to be brought
back to the socio-political context in which they seek to prevail over their oppo-
nents. Even established doctrines are to be understood as remaining in a state
of existential conflict, because their predominance depends on outcomes in the
constant struggle for power. While Weber’s most prominent successors in the
Weimar years shifted the balance, with the existential dimension uppermost for
Carl Schmitt and the sociological context for Karl Mannheim, Weber insisted
that this dual grounding of political phenomena is never overcome.

Using his sociological method of ideal types and his existential account of

politics as power struggle, Weber proposes a model for an impartial political

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clarification of partisan standpoints. He famously argues that social science can
provide all serious partisans with an account of what their position looks like if
consistently held, of the means necessary for the realization of this position once
power is used to achieve it, and finally of the probable consequences that may
follow once one chooses to apply these means within the confines of the state
and economy, as sociologically understood.

8

Yet, he admits that ideal types are

themselves constructed from vantage point of cultural values which are, in turn,
chosen from the standpoint of ultimate ‘practical values’, the very stuff of partisan
positions. Once we recognize this circularity, Weber acknowledges, his socio-
logical account of the meanings and consequences of political choices appears as
only one perspective. Nonetheless, he insists, as long as we adhere to transparency
in the construction of typologies of politics and society, we can claim impartiality
in the testing of partisan positions.

9

In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim radicalizes Weber to produce a science of

politics in which sociology of knowledge aids in constructing political conjunc-
tures of competing ideological positions, each of which sees some aspect of
possibility or the limits to political possibility that the other fails to see. While
each ideology is blind to some aspect of the dynamics that retard or enable
the realization of its goals, each ideology also provides insight into the political
reality out of which it arises and in which it is seeking to intervene. Insisting that
all political sociologies are themselves located in the field of political conflict,
Mannheim argues that there is no one style of thought, vocabulary, or even logic
to judge all conflicting partisan positions.

10

In light of this problem, Mannheim

proposes a new political science that synthesizes the differing assessments of
political reality and possibility into an overview of the ‘political field’ in any one
historical moment. In doing so, he offers a political science which studies those
‘political fields’, at once constituting and conflicting with a dynamic political
‘reality’.

Weber’s version of the political field, especially in ‘Politics as a Vocation’, was

to construct a convergent set of ideal types and tendencies, each of which together
constituted the ‘business-side’ of professional politics.

11

Weber holds this politi-

cal field constant by describing the demands imposed upon the vocational
politician facing ‘the business of politics’. From this ‘impartial’ standpoint, he
tests different partisan positions, among them that of the nationalist, socialist,
syndicalist, and pacifist, against the irrevocable demands of pursuing power in the
modern state, among them the need to use disciplined party machines to win elec-
tions and gain influence in parliaments, the reliance on bureaucratic administra-
tion to carry out policies, and above all, the necessity of mobilizing people
through the display of appropriate forms of charismatic leadership. For Weber,
the bureaucratic state backed by a claim to have the legitimacy to support its
decisions by force, the modern bureaucratic political party, the modern represen-
tative parliament, and the role of the professional politician, form an interlocking
structure that dictates the means of political success and the often unintended

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consequences of realizing one’s political goals. Some partisan positions can live up
to the demands of this business of politics. Others deny these demands, and
unleash consequences that render their actions self-defeating. In Weber’s socio-
logical account, the modern political ‘business’ is the constant. It constitutes the
brute reality with which all political projects must contend.

Mannheim revises this program of political–sociological testing by construct-

ing a ‘political field’ of mutually contesting ideologies, each of which shares an
insight into the dynamics affecting the range and limits of political possibility at a
given time. For Mannheim, the business-side of politics is not held constant.
Rather, the constant is that each contending worldview comprises a mixture of
insight into the role of the irrational will and rational routine – the central
dichotomy informing all of Weber’s typologies. The Weimar conjuncture serves
as the paradigm case here. Fascism as valorization of pure will and bureaucratic
conservatism as the valorization of pure rational routine serve as the limiting
cases. Between them the crucial conflict is fought out among the historical type of
conservatism, liberalism, and socialism in its various forms.

12

A political science

that draws from each of the contesting parties their various assessments for
the exercise of political will and their accounts of the dynamics that further or
inhibit it can provide a more comprehensive account of political possibility – the
exercise of traditional prudence, the rational procedure for negotiating among
competing interests, and the productive capacities of the collectivity in social
affairs – than any one of the parties can provide alone.

13

And this comprehensive

view could ostensibly alter understanding of the political conjuncture by all the
parties, convincing them to face dynamic realities they had overlooked.

14

For Mannheim political–sociological clarification itself arises out of the con-

testation of political ideologies as a feature of its development, as contrasted with
Weber’s claim that the political analyst must adopt an impartial stance by testing
competing positions according to their ability to meet the ideal-typical demands
of the business of politics. In effect, Mannheim pushes the critical self-reflexivity
implicit in Weber’s method to the surface, destabilizing Weber’s sociologically
constructed reality as merely one perspective on a political conjuncture whose
meaning is constantly being contested.

What Mannheim leaves open in Ideology and Utopia is how to treat the utopian

impulse to project possibility beyond what is dynamically given – for, as he argues
in the closing chapter of his book, this utopian demand can serve as a chiliastic
attempt to break with the present at the expense of responsible politics, as a
strategic way in which ideologies discredit their opponents as unrealistic, or as a
discovery process of political projects that may later become possible and realis-
tic. Whatever its mode, it serves to preserve the political will against the victory
of routine administration and routine representative politics.

15

But this leaves

unresolved how to integrate this counterweight to the politics of routine com-
promises and bureaucratic administration into a clarifying self-reflexive political
science. Indeed, Mannheim quite deliberately treats the utopian impulse to act

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beyond the given ‘reality’ as a discovery process for what is politically possible;
and he sets this ‘discovery process’ in dialectical tension with his political science
that teaches conflicting ideological positions how to adapt to the dynamic reality
in which they struggle with one another. It would seem that the next step would
be to explore the boundaries of this tension.

With exile, the project stalls. Instead of forging a political science that uses

sociology of knowledge to alter the political field by testing the claims to political
possibility of competing ideologies and utopias, Mannheim embraces economic
planning, the very danger he warns of at the end of Ideology and Utopia.

16

Further-

more, he separates his new approach to knowledge from practice and concentrates
on launching sociology of knowledge as an academic field. There were two
reasons for Mannheim’s sudden swerve away from the project of a dynamic
Weberian political science and his embrace of planning. First, the sudden collapse
of the Weimar conjuncture prompted Mannheim to give up his original empha-
sis on the irrational will as a discovery of political situations and possibility. He
now identified the valorization of the irrational will with fascism.

17

In abandoning

his dialectic of will and rationalization, however, he was left with nothing but
the rationalization process. Second, with the collapse of Weimar, Mannheim
redefined the concept of crises from one of contending mutually irreconcilable
ideological positions to one of breakdown of controls associated with economic
dislocation and technological change.

18

Mannheim’s shift of interest toward technologically driven economic disrup-

tions is clearly connected to his close association in both Frankfurt and London
with Adolph Lowe, a product of the Kiel school of economics.

19

In Man and Society

in an Age of Reconstruction, Mannheim presupposes the Kiel view of the economy
as a series of dynamically interacting, interdependent functions. On this view, dis-
ruptions in the process of technical change or capital accumulation do not lead to
readjustment but a series of uncompensated non-equilibrium states. Thus crises
such as unemployment, displacement of investment, or social dislocation can only
be overcome by understanding the interrelated parts together.

20

Comprehensive

planning now becomes the way to adapt social and political knowledge to dynamic
reality.

21

The upshot of this move is that planning, the embrace of instrumental

reasoning as applied both to human psychology and administration, substitutes
for the sociological understanding of competing political partisans and their
accounts of political possibility. Weber’s political clarification, based on seeking
to find the paradoxical relations between partisan conviction and the instrumental
demands of power, of laying out the objective possibilities of politics in light of
its sociological constraints, is now almost wholly reduced to one side of the
will–rationality duality: the rationalization of administration as opposed to the
instrumental demands of political conflict. The claims of the will are honored
only in a conditional respect insofar as they are compatible with a notion of
‘freedom’ consistent with the requirements of planning.

Mannheim’s unconvincing reduction of political clarification to the clarifica-

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tion of how individual freedom could be realized through rational achievement of
planning imperatives highlights what I call the Weber–Mannheim problem: how
is it possible to carry on this attempt to launch a self-reflexive political science, one
that clarifies for political actors the meaning of their ideological positions by
bringing those positions back to the sociological context of political conflict, when
the ground for intelligibility of the project seems to have slipped away? Or to put
the matter less abstractly: how did other emigres influenced by the Weber–
Mannheim approach to political science avoid having their own political project
stall with the disappearance of the context that served as the ground for its
meaning?

Here I would like merely to look at three German emigre political thinkers who

sought to translate the Weber–Mannheim project of reconstructing a sociologi-
cally informed political science into the American setting: Arnold Brecht, Hans
Morgenthau, and Franz L. Neumann. In the discussion that follows I am just as
interested in the way these three political scientists constitute a typology of alter-
natives to Mannheim’s retreat as in their respective theories. Of particular
interest here is the way each of the emigre thinkers aligns the assumption of
inexorable power struggle behind all public law and institutions with a sociology
of politics, and how in turn each uses the dialectic between power and political
sociology to test political aims and ideas. I shall want to maintain that Neumann
mobilizes this dialectic with far greater force than the other two. In closing I will
address the tension between the theoretical worth of their contributions and their
academic success.

The Translation of the Project into the American Setting

Arnold Brecht

A thorough but overly literal attempt to sustain the Weber–Mannheim project
was developed by Arnold Brecht and summed up in his Political Theory.

22

In this

book, Brecht tried to forge a political science based on a ‘normative’ adherence to
Weber’s version of the fact–value distinction. For Brecht, the challenge of value
relativism bulked large, not merely methodologically but practically. Indeed, the
rise of totalitarian regimes had flushed out into the open the value-relativism that
modern science had imposed on political theorizing.

23

Endorsing Weber’s claim

that the fact that our cultural values form the horizon for our historical socio-
logical constructs does not mean that we can justify our ultimate political and
moral commitments by appeal to these constructs, Brecht insisted that the
older notion of a political theory based on an appeal to standards rooted in ‘first
principles’ was scientifically superseded.

24

But Brecht claimed that, if we follow

Weber’s attempt to use sociology to evaluate what is politically possible, we
can nevertheless serve a higher normative purpose in the very recognition that
political theory cannot tell you how you ought to act, but only how you can act.

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Expanding Weber’s famous statements on the limited role of social science in
providing self-clarification for political partisans

25

into a comprehensive account

of political advice, Brecht asserts:

. . . it is the function of the political theorist to see . . . the immediate and potential
problems of political life of society; to supply the politician, well in advance, with
alternative courses of action, the foreseeable consequences of which have been fully
thought through; and to supply him not only with brilliant asides, but with a solid block of
knowledge on which to build. . . . When political theory performs its function well, it is
one of the most important weapons in our struggle for the advance of humanity.

26

He then devotes a substantial number of chapters toward the end of his massive
book to showing how ‘science’ broadly conceived can provide us with advice of
great significance to our value commitments. It can do this by demonstrating to
us which (political) goals are ‘impossible’ to achieve, which ones involve us in
unacceptably high risks, or, at the extreme, which ones will prove self-defeating
even if initially realized.

27

To illustrate his point, he then provides a catalogue of

various goals that cannot be politically realized at the same time. Yet, in a critical
departure from Weber, he also cautions against the misuse of impossibility
theories, in particular those purporting to show that socialism and democracy are
incompatible. Here, attacking both Hayek’s and Lenin’s arguments against
the possibility of combining democracy and socialist planning, he lays out the
specific political strategies of parliamentary gradualism and mass political educa-
tion to show that the question regarding the achievement of democratic socialism
remains open.

28

Empirical disproof of the incompatibility of socialism and

democracy, he argues, is not a prediction, but a barrier against a forced choice
between (liberal) democracy or (socialist) dictatorship. Hence, Brecht maintains,
an empirical inquiry of this kind provides a political education for both those
sympathetic and those not sympathetic to the socialist goal. Thus, quite apart
from the strengths or weaknesses of his empirical assessments on this matter,
Brecht claims to have demonstrated how the kind of impartiality sought by
Weber can provide a political education for partisans of irreconcilably conflicting
persuasions.

The problem with this educational impartiality is that it deflects the project of

finding a dynamic political science from substance to method, for it aims more at
demonstrating that the practicality of values can be ‘scientifically’ tested than at
seeking to intervene in the actual political conjuncture in which we are located.
Although Brecht is in fact preoccupied with testing substantive questions of some
moment, he treats these matters merely as examples to demonstrate the superior-
ity of ‘scientific’ political theory over earlier political philosophy. In consequence,
Brecht replaces Weber and Mannheim’s distinctive self-reflexivity as the way to
understand the context for testing contested political positions with an uncritical
deployment of various empirical claims from throughout the social sciences –
some good, some questionable, but all under-examined. The effect of this move
is that the problem of political–sociological clarification is separated from the

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nexus of political action and the struggle for power, a retreat from the original
project of founding a dynamic political science no less striking than that of the
later Mannheim.

Hans Morgenthau

A second direction vigorously and resolutely embraces the derivation of
political–sociological clarification from an existential notion of power struggle,
namely the account of realism in international relations developed by Hans
Morgenthau. Where Brecht was concerned with arguing for the normative
worth of Weberian ‘scientific’ clarification of political possibility in general,
Morgenthau confines the process of clarification to specific relations of power
within international relations. Indeed, he insists the most significant arena of
political conflict is no longer the domestic but rather the international arena:

The best the scholar can do, then, is to trace the different tendencies which, as
potentialities, are inherent in a certain international situation. He can point out the
different conditions that make it more likely for one tendency to prevail than for another,
and finally assess the probabilities for the different conditions and tendencies to prevail in
actuality.

29

At the center of this notion of scientific clarification is Weber’s emphasis on the
power interests of the state and nation as superior to all other interests and his
definition of politics as a struggle for power in the midst of competing values.
Morgenthau also absorbs Weber’s pessimism regarding the inevitability of ‘power
struggle’ in all areas of life. Thus, in Scientific Man and Power Politics he criticizes
liberalism for its belief in science, law, and planning – among his targets here is
explicitly the later Mannheim.

30

Conflict and the struggle for power are not to be

extirpated from political life, and international politics is the arena that exempli-
fies this (existential) fact.

31

For Morgenthau, the central mechanism of stability in international politics

is the well-known appeal to ‘the national interest’. Political clarification now
involves the cultivation of a concrete sense for the competing national interests at
stake in international conflicts, as opposed to the idealistic withdrawal from all
conflict as well as the fatalistic belief that all political conflict is a form of war.
Morgenthau replaces the emphasis on sociologically constructed contexts with
historical examples more typical of the prudential than the sociological tradi-
tion.

32

In a sense, the foregrounding of the existential struggle for power allows

Morgenthau at once to claim to have discovered certain inexorable and objective
laws of politics while claiming we can only understand their manifestations in
specific historical cases.

33

This flattening of Weber’s and Mannheim’s sociologically informed clarifica-

tion of politics in the name of ‘realism’ appears to have been strongly influenced
by Schmitt’s decisionism – liberalism hides at once the existential struggle for
power and the partisan nature of all politics, in particular the struggle of friends

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against enemies as the foundation for the definition of state sovereignty.

34

It was

also, perhaps, a specific reaction to both the isolationism and pacifist idealism that
Morgenthau encountered when he first came to the University of Chicago.
Nonetheless, Morgenthau is not arguing that moral and legal goals have no place
in international relations. In a pale version of Weber’s thesis that an ethic of
responsibility does not preclude some grounding in an ethic of conviction,
Morgenthau contends that awareness of power constellations may be conjoined
with convictions like peace and cooperation.

35

Of course, the concept of national

interest on which this dual argument depends proves to be a rather plastic term
that can encompass or exclude almost any value, and this constructive side of
Morgenthau’s effort – as important as it is to the educational goal of his notion of
political science – fails to carry much conviction.

Franz L. Neumann

The third, and for me the most promising direction is the attempt to forge a
political sociology combining an analysis of the economy, politics, constitutions,
and ideologies so as to reveal the objective possibilities of historical–political con-
junctures. This direction sought first of all to retrace the different political forces
and groupings during the Weimar period and its aftermath, and then to assess
which alternative possible courses of action could have avoided the catastrophic
breakdown. Its foremost representative was Franz L. Neumann and his great
work, Behemoth.

36

In that work, Neumann expressly acknowledged his indebted-

ness to Weber.

37

His relationship to Mannheim is more complex. In line with the

consensus of the Horkheimer–Adorno Institute of Social Research, where he was
housed in New York, he ignored Mannheim in Behemoth and disparaged him in
other contexts after he came to America; but Neumann assigned Mannheim a
place second only to Harold Laski in the dissertation he completed in London in
1935, under their joint supervision. So it is not surprising that Weberian typolo-
gies and Mannheim’s understanding of ideologies in a field of conflict permeate
his masterwork, Behemoth. But no less important, Neumann combines these
currents with Marxian political economy to forge a unique style of prudential
political–sociological theorizing. From a specific structural, economic, political,
sociological, and historical analysis of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent
Nazi state, he derives a general account of the developmental tendencies within
liberal democracy, fascism, and post-liberal democracy and the political decisions
that might steer these tendencies.

In Behemoth, Neuman analyzes the Weimar conjuncture first to determine the

long-range structural basis for the breakdown of the republic and then to look at
alternative courses of action that could have broken the Weimar political impasse
before the Nazis seized the moment. As for the first entry point, Neumann sees
the general causes of the breakdown of the Weimar constitution as rooted both in
the stalemate of powers produced by a constitution based on plural interest groups

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and parties

38

and in a concept of formal political democracy unable to harness the

industrial system to make substantive improvements in the life of its citizens.

39

In

all but the most fortuitously harmonious pluralist democracies, he argues, either
one social group will amass a preponderance of social power, or the differing
groups and parties will paralyze each other, leaving the state bureaucracy as the
central power.

40

Moreover, he points out, a democracy that cannot direct the

economy to serve the primary needs of its citizens will remain ‘a hollow shell’.
The Weimar constitution, as an arrangement of power forged by the dominant
interests, suffered from both of these defects.

Turning then to the political conjuncture of competing forces in Weimar,

Neumann suggests no less than four strategies by which the left could have pre-
vented Hitler’s accession to power. Social democracy might have acted effectively
to promote economic democracy so as to eliminate the egregious and hopeless
disparities contributing to Hitler’s support. The Social Democrats might have
contributed more to fostering a ‘democratic consciousness’ among the populace.

41

More compellingly, he argues, had the Social Democrats and the Communists
recognized Hitler as the truly serious threat and combined to fight him rather
than fighting one another they might have generated a force sufficiently strong to
prevent him from coming to power.

42

He finally points out that the Socialist Party

of Germany, confronted with a stalemate of power, failed to break the impasse
because it underestimated the urgency of the threat from the right and refused to
see that the situation demanded that some party dedicated to social transforma-
tion seize the state and run it. It therefore took a neutral stand, refusing either to
support Hitler’s last competitor, Schleicher, during his brief term in office, or to
achieve a popular front with the Communist Party.

43

Once the Social Democrats

failed to overcome the stalemate through an emergency seizure of power, rightist
dictatorship became the default political alternative. Thus the long-range
structural defects became decisive precisely because the opportunities for politi-
cal intervention were wasted one after the other.

What is striking about this analysis is that Neumann, while not focusing on the

ideological overlap of conflicting political forces in the way Mannheim did in
his account of the political field, also avoids Weber’s reification of the business of
politics into a set of immovable structures and inevitable logics. Rather, he keeps
the long-range trajectory of political and economic decay firmly in view while
showing how each party on the left had the opportunity to intervene in the
situation to prevent its ultimate effects, constitutional collapse and brutal anti-
popular dictatorship. Both the backdrop – the general tendencies of pluralist
regimes to stasis and the corrosive effects of separating democracy from economy
– and the various opportunities of political parties to seize the occasion for break-
ing the stalemate and halting economic decline are kept in a dynamically chang-
ing relation in Neumann’s analysis until all the opportunities are exhausted and
the underlying forces lead to an inexorable result.

Neumann constructs a similarly dynamic analysis of the fascist regime. Refus-

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ing to see it either as a solid centralized structure or as the simple outgrowth of
one dynamic, such as the fusion of state and monopoly power or the massification
of modern politics,

44

Neumann instead portrays it as a floating set of structures:

45

a monopolized economy, the state bureaucracy, the army, and the Nazi Party,
which struggled to synchronize these different forces without success:

Under National Socialism, however, the whole of the society is organized in four solid,
centralized groups, each operating under the leadership principle, each with a legislative
administrative, and judicial power of its own. Neither universal law nor a rationally
operating bureaucracy is necessary for integration. Compromises among the four
authoritarian bodies need not be expressed in a legal document nor must they be
institutionalized. . . . It is quite sufficient that the leadership of the four wings agree
informally to a certain policy. The four totalitarian bodies will then enforce it with a
machinery at their disposal. There is no need for a state standing above all groups; the
state may even be a hindrance to the compromises and to domination over the ruled
classes. The decisions of the Leader are merely the result of the compromises among the
four leaderships.

46

But these compromises even under totalitarian rule are unstable, because these
groups are held together largely by the terror mechanism exercised by the party
and the fear that collapse would destroy their power, profits, and privilege. And
Neumann suggests that the ruling class composed of the elites of these groups will
disintegrate once the leader faces true opposition and potential defeat – a predic-
tion that in the event proved to be partially correct. Thus, he finds not only a
dynamic conflict where one would only see a monolithic form of state power, but
also a source of potential breakdown in the need to keep the state constantly
expanding militarily or risk losing control over the competing forces which com-
pose it.

47

Curiously, Neumann’s conclusion written in 1942 seeks to draw from the

eventual defeat of the fascist regime a prudential political lesson for the future that
coincides with the lesson he draws from the breakdown of Weimar: England and
the United States can only set a successful example for democratizing Germany if
they more thoroughly democratize themselves. And, although not explicit about
the kinds of democratization he has in mind, it is fairly obvious he means this in
two senses. First, these democracies must politically educate their citizens and
bring the stalemate characteristic of pluralist democracies to an end. Second, they
must democratize their economies by putting them under democratic control,
in particular eliminating the enormous influence of monopolistic forms of
capitalism.

48

A new model of democracy in Germany would only be plausible if

the countries imposing that model eliminated the discrepancy between political
equality and economic injustice in their own political arrangements. Only in this
way, will they eliminate the defects of Weimar and immunize themselves against
the tendencies that produced the fascist regime in the first place. Neither of these
outcomes occurred, but the force of Neumann’s lessons does not depend on the
actual historical outcome.

49

Rather they are projections of dangers inherent in

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liberal democracies in general. And their significance is revealed through his
particular historical account of the interplay between the converging political,
economic, and social dynamics of the Weimar Republic and those of German
fascism. As such, they offered an orientation to practice whose present-day eclipse
we may still live to regret.

Success or Failure in Grounding a New Political Science?

Neumann seems to have been most successful both in avoiding Mannheim’s
blockage and reversal and in providing a multilayered, dynamic, and sociologi-
cally embedded version of political theory. That is, unlike the other two emigre
scholars, he has provided ‘a multi-dimensional theory of political rule and domi-
nation’, to use Alfons Söllner’s phrase.

50

At the center of his inquiry are a number

of classic questions of political theory: dictatorship versus democracy, liberal
political institutions, and the problem of democratic sovereignty, law versus force,
and the relation of capitalism and socialism to democracy.

51

However, he places

these questions within both a dynamic analysis of converging tendencies – politi-
cal, economic, ideological, and social structural – affecting the political field and
an account of the moments when political choices can or could have resolved
these questions in one way or another. Political theory informs the construction
of the sociology of the liberal, fascist, and post-fascist state; and in turn, the
sociology informs the meaning of the political theory questions at stake in the
various forms of state.

52

The existential problem of political power and conflict is

neither bracketed out nor is it held separate from the sociological and structural
account of the dynamics of liberalism, fascism, and democracy.

The other two political thinkers seem in different ways to have flattened

the dynamic aspect of the Weberian and Mannheimian notions of a prudential
political science. Brecht tends to invoke social science generalities to test the
possibilities of some of the fundamental values of politics, but he takes those
generalities where he finds them without accounting for their construction.
Moreover, he substitutes the struggle over justification of values – the famous
value-relativism question – for the attempt to tie these values to the struggle
for political power. Morgenthau, by contrast, does not neglect the existential
struggle for power in politics, finding a variety of notions of national interest in a
grand variety of carefully chosen historical cases. But the construction of his cases
is not accounted for, and the concept of political possibility is restricted to the
variety of ways states seek power to pursue what they take to be their national
interest, while other dynamics are simply bracketed out.

Of course, the academic reception of these strands did not correspond to their

theoretical force. Indeed, it was Morgenthau who most successfully inserted him-
self into American political science, framing the field of international relations for
generations – though it must be said that his own interest in furthering the ideals
of cooperation and peace through the pursuit of power for the sake of national

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interest was overlooked. Brecht’s book, ironically, was praised by some of the
founders of the behaviorialist movement – it became for a time a standard book
on reading lists for political theory graduate students – but has been mostly
forgotten. And Neumann’s subsequent work never quite had the force of his
original Behemoth. Indeed, in a set of essays written before his premature death in
1954, Neumann seemed to oscillate between a dynamic account of the autonomy
of political power and freedom as autonomous action in the backdrop of a
political–economic criticism of liberalism, and a rather static model of democracy
in which interest groups protected citizens against the forces of bureaucratization
and capital, and parties organized the political will.

53

As for Behemoth, it was

absorbed in the academic debate over the structure of fascism rather than seen as
an example of how one goes about engaging in a dynamic political science along
the lines set by Weber and Mannheim.

54

But then, commentators have pointed

out that Weber’s approach to political science in general never quite caught on in
Germany or the United States.

55

As for Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, this work

is still largely read for its classical statement of the sociology of knowledge
approach to the study of ideology and its famous account of free-floating intel-
lectuals and not for its program for a new science of politics. It would seem the
Weber–Mannheim project of founding a new sociologically informed political
theory is still waiting to be rediscovered. A major objective in recovering the work
of the emigre political scientists is precisely its ability, when read genealogically,
to recall us to this vital project.

Notes

1. Adolph Lowe (1987) Essays in Political Economics: Public Control in a Democratic Society.

New York: New York University Press.

2. Lewis A. Coser (1984) Refugee Scholars in America, p. 85. New Haven: Yale University

Press.

3. Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’ and an account of his political writings did not become

generally available in English until the 1946 collection of excerpts, prepared by
Mannheim’s student, Hans Gerth, and by C. Wright Mills. See Max Weber (1946) From
Max Weber, eds and tr. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University
Press.

4. Alfons Söllner, ‘From Public Law to Political Science? The Emigration of German

Scholars after 1933 and their Influence on the Transformation of a Discipline’, in
Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner (eds) (1996) Forced Migration and Scientific Change:
Emigre German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933, p. 247. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

5. John G. Gunnell (1993) The Descent of Political Theory: An American Vocation. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, chs 8, 9.

6. Max Weber (1994) ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Political Writings, ed.

and tr. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, p. 311. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

7. Max Weber (1972) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck],

p. 28.

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8. Max Weber (1982) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes

Winckelmann, pp. 607, 150, 510, 539. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 5th edn.

9. Ibid., p. 533.

10. Karl Mannheim (1936) Ideology and Utopia, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils,

pp. 116–17. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World. Karl Mannheim (1985) Ideologie
und Utopie, p. 101. Frankfurt/M.: Vittoria Klostermann. I cite both the English tr. and
the German original, except where the latter deviates – as it often does – from the
former.

11. Weber (n. 6), 314–15, 320, 325, 352.
12. Mannheim (n. 10), 117–46, 102–32.
13. Ibid., 150, 130.
14. David Kettler and Volker Meja (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crises of Liberalism, p. 85.

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

15. See Mannheim (n. 10), ch. 4.
16. Mannheim (n. 10), 262–3, 224–5
17. Kettler and Meja (n. 14), 114, 116, 134–6. Karl Mannheim (2001) Sociology as Political

Education, tr. and ed. David Kettler and Colin Loader, pp. 30–42, 175–94. New
Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction.

18. Ibid., pp. 165–9, 171.
19. Ibid., pp. 134–5. Claus-Dieter Krohn (1993) Intellectuals in Exile, tr. Rita Kimber and

Robert Kimber, pp. 58, 101–11. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

20. Karl Mannheim (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, tr. Edward Shils,

pp. 49–50. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.

21. Ibid., p. 70.
22. Arnold Brecht (1959) Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
23. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
24. Ibid., 3–9.
25. Weber (n. 8), 607. Weber (n. 3), 151–2.
26. Brecht (n. 22), 20.
27. Ibid., pp. 423–55, 431–2, 437–44.
28. Ibid., pp. 449–53.
29. Hans Morgenthau (1948) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New

York: Knopf, p. 7.

30. Hans Morgenthau (1946) Scientific Man and Power Politics, pp. 34, 145–52. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

31. Ibid., pp. 42–6.
32. Morgenthau (n. 29), 5. It is worth noting that in this edn, Morgenthau had not yet

presented his six principles of realism for which he became so famous.

33. Ibid., pp. 4–5. Hans-Karl Pichler (1998) ‘The Godfathers of “Truth”: Max Weber and

Carl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s Theory of Power Politics’, Review of International Studies
24(185): 185–7, 191, points out that Morgenthau overcame Weber’s argument for the
value-relatedness of all social science constructs by simply claiming that all politics
involves the irreducible fact of conflict and a struggle for power and, since this flows
from human nature, one can discover objective laws of politics. By putting the existential
notion of politics as incessant political struggle front and center and locating this notion
in the international arena where, on the face of it, no overarching authority exists, he
does not feel compelled to justify his claim to impartiality.

34. See Pichler (n. 33). Alfons Söllner (1987) ‘German Conservatism in America:

Morgenthau’s Political Realism’, Telos 72 (Summer): 161–72.

35. See Thomas C. Walker (1999) ‘Introduction: Morgenthau’s Dual Approach to

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International Politics’, International Studies Notes 24(1): 1–3. Brian Schmidt (1998) The
Political Discourse of Anarchy, p. 224. Albany: State University of New York Press.

36. Franz Neumann (1966) Behemoth. New York: Harper & Row.
37. Ibid., pp. 80, 95–7. Neumann’s most extensive tribute to Weber is found in his famous

essay on social sciences among the emigres, where he exempts him from his general
dismissal of university political studies in Germany: ‘Weber’s greatness consists in a
unique combination of a theoretical frame (although for me of doubtful validity), a
mastery of a tremendous amount of data, and a full awareness of the political
responsibility of the scholar’. Franz Neumann, ‘The Social Sciences’, in R. Crawford
(ed.) (1953) The Cultural Migration, pp. 21–2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.

38. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
39 Ibid., p. 34.
40. Despite Neumann’s insistence on the validity of formal law, this critique tracks that of

Carl Schmitt very closely. See D. Kelly (2002) ‘Rethinking Franz Neumann’s Route to
Behemoth’, History of Political Thought 23(3): 491–2. More pointedly, Keith Tribe (1995)
‘Capitalism, Totalitarianism, and the Legal Order’, Strategies of Economic Order.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 192. Tribe claims that the analytic
framework of Behemoth relies heavily on Schmitt – in particular the criticism of Weimar
and the notion of the subsequent Nazi state as a state of lawlessness – yet Neumann
attributes to Nazi ideology many of the same concepts and categories.

41. Neumann (n. 36), 29.
42. Ibid., p. 30.
43. Ibid.
44. Emil Lederer (1940) The State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society. New York:

W. W. Norton & Co.

45. Neumann (n. 36), 365–400.
46. Ibid., 468–9, 522.
47. Ibid., 396–8, 360–1.
48. Ibid., 400. There are subtleties – and perhaps some ambivalences – in Neumann’s

account of pluralism in democracy. Although he is firm about the failure of the Weimar
Republic to impose a notion of democratic sovereignty, he also acknowledges the
importance of social pluralism (and social contestation) as a feature of democracy. The
principle evidently rests on a distinction between political and social pluralism, although
the argument doubtless also rests on his reading of various possibilities – and a certain
tactical flexibility.

49. There is a third element that Neumann shared with many on the left at that time: he

believed that only a popular revolt against the four-part ruling class that constituted the
fascist regime would ensure democracy in the new post-fascist democratic state. Leaving
aside Neumann’s empirical misreading of the power constellation, we can say that the
projection of a popular rebellion was another attempt to foresee the conditions for post-
fascist democracies throughout the West, but again, democracy defined from a post-
capitalist viewpoint. See Pierre Aycoberry (1981) The Nazi Question, tr. Robert Hurley,
pp. 97–8, 104. New York: Random House.

50. Alfons Söllner (1979) Geschichte und Herrschaft: Studien zu materialistischen

Sozialwissenschaft 1929–1942, p. 50. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

51. In all fairness, Brecht also addressed these questions but only as ways of demonstrating

the possibility for achieving Weberian impartiality in political theory.

52. See Söllner (n. 50), 213, for a different account of Neumann’s dynamic theory of political

rule and domination.

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53. There is some dispute over whether Neumann adhered in his later essays to his original

project of providing a multidimensional account of political ideas in relation to the
political, economic, ideological, and social structural dynamics impinging upon liberal
politics, or abandoned it in favor of furthering a pluralist model of democracy as a
protection for personal freedom. For the former argument see Söllner (n. 50). For the
latter see Hubertus Buchstein (1992) Politikwissenschaft und Demokratie. Baden-Baden:
Nomos Verlagsgesllschaft.

54. See Aycoberry (n. 49), 91–9. David Schoenbaum (1966) Hitler’s Social Revolution. Garden

City, NY: Doubleday & Co.

55. Gangolf Hübinger, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Wolfgang Welz (1990) ‘Max Weber und

die Wissenschaftliche Politik nach 1945: Aspekte einer theoriegeschichtlichen Nicht-
Rezeption’, Zeitschrift für Politik 37, pp. 181–2.

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