As Alfons Söllner notes in ‘Neumann als Archetypus – die Formierung des political scholar im 20. Jahrhundert’ [Neumann as Archetype – The Formation of the Political Scholar in the 20th Century], there has been no true biography of Franz Neumann to date, and due to the lack of a Neumann archive, it is unlikely that one will be created (Söllner, 2002: 42). What is known of Neumann draws primarily from his work, correspondence and anecdotal interviews with his sister and former students. As a result, there is an unfortunate degree of uncertainty in many basic details of his life which is reflected in the following sketch.
Franz Leopold Neumann was born to German-Jewish parents in 1900 in the small town of Kattowitz, located in what was then Silesia. His father was a successful tanner and a figure of some prominence within the local Jewish community – nonetheless, this tradesman heritage differed sharply from the bourgeois upbringing of later colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer. This distinction is worth emphasizing, as it most likely influenced the course of his education and chosen profession (Söllner, 2002: 46). Franz was remembered by his sister as the gifted child of the family, the only child of five to attend Gymnasium in neighboring Krakow. During his first two years of study in 1918–19, Neumann attended three different universities in as many semesters: Breslau, Leipzig and Rostock. In Leipzig, he took part in the barricade combat of the November Revolution, which Duncan Kelly characterizes as the beginning and end of his revolutionary ambitions (Kelly, 2002: 460). In 1919 Neumann moved again to Frankfurt am Main, where he completed several degrees. In 1923 he completed his dissertation Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung zu einer Abhandlung über das Verhältnis von Staat und Strafe [A Legal-Philosophical Introduction to a Treatise on the Relation between State and Punishment] in 1923 under the tutelage of Hugo Sinzheimer, a man described by Rolf Wiggershaus as ‘the founder of German employment law and one of the fathers of the Weimar constitution’ (Wiggershaus, 1995: 223). In Frankfurt, Neumann met both Ernst Fraenkel, his future law partner, and Leo Löwenthal, his first connection with a future member of the Frankfurt School. After completing his degree, Neumann published essays on the topics of law and labor practices, worked as an instructor at the Labor Academy and lectured to unions. Neumann’s early works are notable for connecting a theoretical interest in the nature of society and economy inspired by the Austrian Marxists with labor law and democratic reformism (Wiggershaus, 1995: 223).
In 1928 Neumann moved to Berlin in order to establish a law practice with Ernst Fraenkel. While in Berlin he met Otto Kirchheimer and lectured alongside Carl Schmitt and Hermann Heller at the College of Politics. From 1928 to 1933 Neumann fought ceaselessly against right-wing encroachments on the constitution, becoming one of the most prominent lawyers of the SPD. In 1933 the SA occupied Fraenkel and Neumann’s law office in an attempt to arrest Neumann, who, as a result of his political activity and Jewish heritage, had the dubious distinction to be among the first stripped of German citizenship. To avoid arrest Neumann fled to London, where he studied under the patronage of Harold Laski, whom he had met previously when Laski traveled to Berlin to strengthen ties between the Labour Party and the SPD (Söllner, 2002: 48). Like Kirchheimer, Neumann initially continued writing articles under pseudonyms that were to be imported into Germany in order to foment resistance, but eventually gave up once he determined this course to be ineffective. Unable to practice law due to differences in the legal system, Neumann used his experience teaching at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a bridge to re-education at the London School of Economics, where in 1936 he completed his second dissertation, The Governance of the Rule of Law: An Investigation into the Relationship between the Political Theories, the Legal System and the Social Background in the Competitive Society, a work which ‘owed much for its methodology to Karl Mannheim, Max Weber and Marx, and for its content to Harold Laski’ (Wiggershaus, 1995: 225).
Neumann moved to New York that same year in order to join the Institute for Social Research, a position Laski helped him to obtain (Jay, 1973: 144). Neumann’s official connection with the Institute would be brief, lasting only from 1936 to 1940. Wiggershaus characterizes Horkheimer’s attitude towards Neumann, Kirchheimer and others excluded from the Institute’s inner circle as uncharitable bordering on exploitative. Neumann’s role within the Institute was largely administrative, ranging from organizational duties to legal counsel and defense, including a trip to Buenos Aires to defend the family interests of Felix Weil. When Neumann discovered in 1939 that he was to be included in cuts to peripheral figures of the Institute, he complained in a letter to Horkheimer that he had been assured a permanent position, and furthermore that his administrative and legal functions had kept him from publishing frequently, a fact which would make finding a position at a university difficult. Nevertheless, it was during his time at the Institute that he was able to establish a lasting connection with Columbia University through lectures on the totalitarian state in 1936–7 and again in 1941, a connection which would eventually lead to a full professorship. More importantly, it was during this time that Neumann wrote his magnum opus, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944. The work owed its existence to a debate within the Frankfurt School, and was in part written against Friedrich Pollock’s conception of state capitalism. Behemoth was important not only for Neumann but for the Institute as a whole, with which it was associated despite a lack of official recognition (Jay, 1973: 162). It was not only the Institute’s first major work written in English, but also remained its most popular work for years, a popularity which William Jones ascribes to Neumann’s more empirical approach, an empiricism which found wider reception in the Anglo-American audience (Jones, 1999: 149).
Behemoth’s success opened a number of doors for Neumann and is often credited with securing him a job advising in the US State Department in 1942 and later in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the CIA. As Matthias Stoffregen notes, Behemoth is permeated with a practical concern for how the Nazis were to be defeated, and also the manner in which Germany was to be rebuilt in the wake of Nazi rule (Stoffregen, 2002). Neumann was eventually joined at the OSS by other ex-Frankfurt School members such as Marcuse, Kirchheimer and Gurland. Working as a team, they coauthored a series of reports advising US foreign policy. Just how influential this group of Institute ex-patriots was a matter of debate: Joachim Perels notes that there was a sizeable cultural gap between the more theoretically minded Marxist Jewish Germans and their conservative and practically oriented American colleagues (Perels, 2002: 86). Nevertheless, their shared concept of technical rationality coupled with Behemoth’s depiction of Nazi Germany as a non-state ruled by four competing powers did have an impact on policy. Most notably, the initial structuring of the Nuremberg Trials followed Behemoth’s four-powers conception of complicity in an attempt to broaden the scope and effectiveness of denazification (Hilberg, 2001: 81). Furthermore, Neumann’s conviction that Germany under the Nazis had been a lawless state initially invalidated the nulla poena sine lege defense of war criminals (Perels, 2002: 85, 92). Ultimately, however, few prosecutions against complicit members of industry were successful, and the retroactive invalidation of Nazi law was also lifted from 1955 until 1998, allowing many to avoid prosecution. While the ex-Frankfurt School group argued for the expansion of guilt in Nazi leadership, they simultaneously argued against actions such as the Morgenthau Plan, which sought to deindustrialize Germany, arguing that not all Germans were Nazis and that in particular the lower and working classes had remained uncorrupted by Nazi propaganda, again expressing convictions central to Behemoth. They were similarly concerned with the manner in which democracy was to be established within the new nation, advocating optimistically for the Allied forces to allow for a democratic movement to form naturally within the shattered nation, instead of attempting the seemingly impossible task of instilling a democratic spirit by force (Stoffregen, 2002: 61).
Neumann worked for various state agencies from the dissolution of the OSS, in 1945, until 1947, when, in part due to the changing atmosphere within the United States, as the anti-fascism of the Second World War transformed into the anti-communism of the Cold War (Stoffregen, 2002: 63), he left. In 1948 Neumann was granted first a visiting and then full professorship at Columbia University, where he had continued to give lectures throughout his work for the state. Raul Hilberg, Holocaust scholar and former doctoral student of Neumann, described Neumann as extremely popular and influential, boasting more advisees than any of his colleagues (Hilberg and Söllner, 1988: 177). Hilberg also credits Behemoth as a major source of inspiration for his own work, The Destruction of the European Jews, for which he adopted Neumann’s conception of the non-state, the four power structures and the emphasis on continuity between the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. During his tenure at Columbia, Neumann began traveling to Berlin, where he helped establish the Institute for Political Science at the Freie Universität, in addition to founding what would later become the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science. Mattias Iser and David Strecker (2002: 7) position Neumann as one of the founding figures of political science as a discipline within Germany, cross-pollinating the more legal and social-theory-oriented German form with the empiricism of the Anglo-American model. Neumann died in a car accident in Germany in 1954 at the age of 54, an early death which is typically listed as one of the primary causes for his diminished presence in modern literature.
Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, first published in 1942, is comprised of five sections: an introduction, three main sections and an appendix added in 1944. The introduction provides a brief history of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, establishing certain trends which led to the production of the National Socialist regime. Section one examines the primary political structures within National Socialism, introducing the idea of the non-state, the Nazi party as a movement, a Weberian concept of the charismatic leader and the idea of a racial people. Section two is an extensive study of the function of economics within National Socialist Germany, much of which is written explicitly against Pollock’s assertion of the primacy of the political. Section three is broken into thirds, one dedicated to the organization of the ruling elite, one to the atomized and dominated ruled class and one to summarizing the theory of the Behemoth, as well as including predictions for the future and a plea for the manner in which Germany should be rebuilt. The 1944 appendix makes primarily factual changes regarding the structure and personnel of administrative bodies, although it also expands significantly on Neumann’s theory of anti-Semitism and hints at an ascendency of the party relative to the other three powers. The following analysis seeks to create a single narrative of argumentation highlighting the material economic core of Behemoth. Any attempt to summarize a work as rich and complex as Behemoth is bound to make major sacrifices. What has been primarily lost in my condensation is, on the one hand, the work’s staggering empirical rigor and, on the other, specific references to its theoretical heritage. This has been done in order to render more clearly those aspects unique to Behemoth, both in order to better situate it in larger discourses and to underscore what it can still tell us about the formation and functioning of fascism.
The fundamental claim of Behemoth is that the Weimar Republic collapsed due to an increasing disparity between the forces and relations of production. Already during the German Empire, agriculture and industry had begun consolidating; in a now familiar process, technological innovation allowed for ever more efficient means of large-scale production, which in turn led to the concentration of the means of production into a rapidly shrinking number of cartels, monopolies and industrial combines. As efficiency and productive capacity increased, so too did the demand for resources and markets, creating an explosively expansionary dynamic within the German Empire which played no small part in precipitating the First World War. While the war provided an enormous, if temporary, release for the productive capacity of German industry, the discrepancy between the forces and relations of production increased drastically in its aftermath. The problem was that while the productive capacity remained unchanged, and even continued to expand, the societal support surrounding it had been severely damaged. German trade was restricted, limiting access to both potential markets and raw materials, as was labor capital, by the huge losses of life incurred during the war; along with heavy war reparations they contributed to prevent production from operating anywhere near peak efficiency and thereby profitability. This discrepancy created tremendous political pressure within the fledgling Republic, a pressure which it was unable to resolve, either through further socialization of the means of production or in gaining sufficient concessions from its international trade partners to allow for peaceful expansion. The National Socialists, on the other hand, were able to resolve the discrepancy and to provide a framework for nearly limitless growth through militarization, public works projects and, inescapably, violent expansion (Neumann, 1944: 3–34).
The central axiom of Neumann’s theory is that every mode of production has a corresponding and complementary political system. During the era of competitive capitalism, prior to the rise of monopoly capitalism, the liberal constructs of the rule of law and property rights had best matched the needs of the economic system. Competitive capitalism requires many small, relatively equal entrepreneurs, who, through mutual competition, drive the economic ‘law’ of supply and demand, creating a price mechanism which regulates the market. Liberal democracy and the rule of law achieves this by placing all individuals as well as all organs of state under a universal set of norms, creating basic legal equality and freedom on the basis of the inviolability of the individual’s right to person and property. Legal equality is necessary because it produces the calculability and predictability required by the ‘economic laws’ of the free market; for the price mechanism of supply and demand to function, individuals must be free to create contracts between one another to sell their property and labor with the assurance that the state will honor and enforce these contracts. The creation of this predictable system is raised to moral imperative by the fact that classical liberalism declares that it is through the progressive motion of competitive capitalism that humanity as a whole is guided towards ever greater prosperity and happiness (Neumann, 1944: 255–61).
Because Neumann’s understanding of the political realm claims that it exists to satisfy the needs of the economic, he therefore contends that the common understanding of ‘laissez faire’ as the total absence of governmental interference is incorrect: instead, within liberalism and the rule of law, the state must constantly interfere in order to uphold those conditions necessary for competition. Again, because the movement of the economy and society as a whole was believed to be responsible for humankind’s eventual emancipation, the ‘natural lawyers’ of the seventeenth century and the ‘classical economists’ of the eighteenth recognized that it is not enough for competition to be theoretically and legally preserved: it must be actualized. If, despite the continued legal ability to buy and sell goods, actual competition becomes impossible due to the establishment of monopolies, it is the responsibility of the state to intervene and re-establish a competitive market. If the state does not intervene and monopolies are allowed to persist, their size allows them to subvert the price mechanism through price fixing, flooding the market and buying out competitors. This was increasingly the case in both the Weimar Republic and in the German Empire before it. Neumann attributes this shift to several factors: first, to a complicity between the governmental and economic elite. Throughout Behemoth, Neumann is at pains to demonstrate the huge and troubling degree of continuity in judicial and bureaucratic branches of government, both between the Empire and the Republic as well as between the Republic and the Third Reich, a conservative core allied to large industry and the military and arrayed against the progressive, redistributive aspects of liberal ideology. Second, Neumann faults the left, and in particular his own party, the SPD, for a crippling degree of indecision – the SPD was famously unsure if they were to act as the doctors or poisoners of the ailing competitive economy. Following traditional Marxist theory, many saw the consolidation of businesses into increasingly large conglomerates and corporations to be an inevitable function of the economic process and welcomed it as heralding the end of capitalism (Neumann, 1944: 13–16).
Finally, and most importantly, Neumann notes that monopolization of the economy was hastened by technological changes within the manufacturing process itself. Neumann, building on the work of A.R.L. Gurland, argued that in the late 1920s and early 1930s Germany experienced a second industrial revolution. The salient example of this transformation was the creation of polymers through new chemical processes. Polymers represented a fundamental shift in the demands of manufacturing; the final reaction necessary for their creation required heat and pressure of a scale previously unimaginable, which necessitated the creation of factories on a new scale and with a greater degree of centralization, requiring unheard-of levels of economic risk on the part of investors. This risk was heightened by the highly experimental nature of the end product; millions had to be spent creating wholly new materials that would possibly have no commercial viability. Polymerization, however, is only the final step in a much larger economic process; it requires huge amounts of raw materials to be completed, especially coal, which in turn requires massive infrastructure for its mining, shipping and supply. Polymerization and other similar emerging manufacturing processes exceeded the limits of competitive capitalism: the property rights and universally valid contracts that are its cornerstone worked instead to restrict the growth of monopoly concerns. The vertical integration necessary for polymerization demanded individual measures designed to suit the immediate material and labor needs of the monopoly, not universal norms. These monopolies needed the state as an ally and not as an impartial arbiter, an ally which would cover the staggering losses associated with plant experimentation, an ally which could provide markets of sufficient scale to make the manufacturing process economically viable (Neumann, 1944: 277–92).
Neumann contends that the conditions required by vertically integrated manufacturing processes of scale specifically, and monopoly capitalism in general, were best met in the German context by National Socialism. Crucially, the National Socialist party did not establish a state at all. Neumann gives two possible understandings of the term ‘state’: first, the more commonly understood liberal interpretation, one which is ‘characterized by the rule of law’ – that is, the establishment of a universal precedent which must be obeyed even by the governing body that created it (Neumann, 1944: 467). Through law, the monopoly of violence possessed by the state is in all instances a mediated and predictable violence, a distinction which differentiates it from the ‘natural law’ of sheer force. The second, more limited, understanding of the state is simply the monopoly of violence in a sovereign body. Unlike the rule of law, citizens in this limited sense of state remain vulnerable to excesses of the sovereign body but are nevertheless protected from the chaotic violence of natural law. Life under National Socialism afforded none of these guarantees or protections. While the Nazi party left the laws and the constitution of the Weimar Republic largely unchanged, the laws themselves lost all operative force, and even new legislation created by the National Socialist government itself was largely ignored. This is because the essence of law, delimitation, is antithetical to the ‘movement’ which the National Socialists sought to establish (Neumann, 1944: 422). The Nazis worked constantly to destroy the universality upon which laws depend, instead acting in accordance with the individual discretion of the judge or, as was more frequently the case, the administrator of the law. It was not the letter but the ‘spirit’ of the law which was championed, a shift which destroyed the calculable, rational foundation of the law: ‘If general law is the basic form of right, if law is not only voluntas but also ratio, then we must deny the existence of law in the fascist state’ (Neumann, 1944: 450). Stripped of the egalitarian properties granted by universal applicability, law which has ceased to be law functions as an instrument of obfuscation and terror, cloaking real relations of power between employer/employee and ruler/ruled in a mystical language of shared racial destiny. Neumann writes, ‘The average lawyer will be repelled by the idea that there can be a legal system that is nothing more than a means of terrorizing people’ (Neumann, 1944: 440). The specificity and partiality of the individual measure, coupled with its ability to hide power relations behind vague ideological statements, provided precisely the direct support which monopolies had been denied under universal law.
Beyond lacking the protective and stabilizing framework of the rule of law, Neumann argues that National Socialist Germany failed to meet even the most primitive definition of the state as monopoly of violence in a sovereign body. Instead of one sovereign body, four discrete sources of power existed in an uneasy state of equilibrium within Germany: the army, the bureaucracy, the National Socialist party and the captains of industry. Each power bloc ‘is equipped with legislative, administrative and judicial power of its own’ (Neumann, 1944: 398). In place of calculable norms, the population of Germany found itself the object of four competing and overlapping jurisdictions. These competing jurisdictions had the combined effect of reducing the individual from a citizen of a state to an object of multiple dominations, a situation which lacked even the most basic guarantee of the state: safety against the strong. The temporary alliance which bound these separate fiefdoms together was an alliance of mutual dependency and loosely shared goals and not the result of either a single unifying ideology or the total bureaucratic centralization of the state. The distinction between an ideology and ‘a series of ever shifting goals’ is important. Neumann defines an ideology as a rational political theory, one which exists among others and attempts to persuade that it possesses the best explanatory force (Neumann, 1944: 38, 464). Nazi ideology, by contrast, was ‘a mere arcanum dominationis, a technique outside of right and wrong, a sum of devices for maintaining power’ (Neumann, 1944: 465). As a result, it was an ‘infinitely elastic’ ideology which could position the party as simultaneously ‘for agrarian reform and against it, for private property and against it, for idealism and against it’ (Neumann, 1944: 438). Neumann argued that even ‘magical beliefs’, such as ‘leadership adoration, the supremacy of the master race’, were not so much central organizing principles as they were a convenient cover for the one goal shared by all factions: limitless expansion (Neumann, 1944: 439).
That the National Socialist party had not established a state, let alone a totalitarian one, was by design. This was again partly due to the fact that they correctly recognized that any state, even in its most limited sense, tends to restrict arbitrary power. Another factor was the recognition that the ‘fundamental goal’ of National Socialism, ‘the resolution by imperialistic war of the discrepancy between the potentialities of Germany’s industrial apparatus and the actuality’, was best served by allowing the four major power bodies to operate independently of one another (Neumann, 1944: 38). In other words, it was a tacit acknowledgment by the Nazi party that it lacked the expertise and manpower to successfully regulate all aspects of German society, in particular the economy. It was for this reason that the ‘material foundations of society’ were left untouched (Neumann, 1944: 467). Neumann’s use of ‘material’ here seems to imply material only in the limited sense of ‘economic’, but it is important to remember that the economic for Neumann also has a concretely material aspect; by granting industry the freedom to operate with a large degree of autonomy, the National Socialist party was pragmatically deferring not only to the superior knowledge of management but also to the material dynamics of the process of production itself.
In order to assert the relative autonomy of all four factions, it is necessary for Neumann to reject the apparent and openly stated structure of Nazi rule. After all, the rise of National Socialism was accompanied by a staggering escalation in bureaucratic apparatus, which at least appeared to dominate all aspects of life, including the economy. Neumann concedes that for the everyday experience of the population, this totalizing bureaucratic penetration and domination was very real. In attempting to free itself and the other power blocs of all normative restrictions, the Nazi party had begun an exhaustive process of destroying all mediating institutions within society, such as families, unions, political parties, etc. and replacing them with bureaucracies of scale (Neumann, 1944: 367). In this manner, the party which claimed to honor the family actively sought its destruction through organizations such as the Hitler Jugend and pro-birth-rate policies and institutions. Similarly, instead of trade-based unions, the monolithic German Labor Front replaced specific interests with a representation so diffuse and ineffectual that it served none of its members. This indicates the other side of Nazi bureaucratization: while the number and size of bureaucracies skyrocketed, their efficacy dwindled to non-existence. Like Nazi law, bureaucracies more often than not functioned as an empty ‘shell’, something which served no operative function beyond obscuring underlying power struggles (Neumann, 1944: 525). Real power was not achieved through bureaucratic positions but by situating oneself at the intersections of the four power blocs. The ‘regulation’ of industry was for this reason a farce: in most instances, the party bureaucracies tasked with regimenting industry were occupied by the members of the industrial elite, just as the executive boards of industry were home to many high-ranking party officers. As Neumann grimly notes, under fascism, ‘The practitioners of violence tend to become businessmen, and the businessmen become practitioners of violence’ (Neumann, 1944: 632).
To state it more sharply than Neumann’s own formulation, underneath the ideological claims of the Nazi party, the expansionist impulse of Nazi Germany was fueled not only by the profit-driven desires of the heads of industry but also by the will of the polymer molecule itself. By intimately linking the form of government with the mode of production, it becomes possible to suggest that the rise of Hitler was preceded and accelerated by material relations descending to the atomic level. The Behemoth is an anti-state designed to unleash the productive and destructive potential of monopoly capitalism through the eradication of all mediating institutions and restrictive norms.
The debate over State Capitalism is often depicted in rather lurid terms, describing the opposing sides as ‘fronts’ and emphasizing the vehemence with which the two groups opposed one another. The two sides are typically drawn with the ‘inner circle’ of Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock comprising one ‘camp’, and Neumann, Kirchheimer, Gurland and Marcuse making up the other, although sometimes Marcuse is indicated as a mediating agent (Dubiel and Söllner, 1981: 23). Though no one goes so far as to suggest a causal link, this narrative is strengthened by the fact that shortly after this debate, the entire outer circle had to leave the Institute due to budgetary constraints. Each side had a clear protagonist, with Friedrich Pollock standing as the main proponent of State Capitalism and Neumann representing Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism. Despite the seriousness of the debate within the Frankfurt School, the two theories share many core assumptions. Both blame the disparity between the forces and the relations of production within monopoly capitalism for the rise of National Socialism. Both agree, at least historically, that modes of government had been dictated by the modes of production, and that specifically liberal democracy was the government of competitive capitalism before it was replaced with mass parties and fascism in monopoly capitalism (see Pollock, 1933). These similarities have led some scholars to claim the fascism debates were much ado about nothing, with Wiggershaus proclaiming that they ‘were basically quibbles about words’ (Wiggershaus, 1995: 288). This position becomes untenable when the debate is viewed through the material economic lens developed in the previous section; at stake are claims about the functioning of capitalist economies at the most fundamental level. The following section will sharpen this distinction before suggesting that, by reading Pollock and Neumann’s competing theories as part of a Gesamtgestalt, it is possible to turn these differences into an analytical strength of a general Frankfurt School theory of fascism.
The disagreement between State Capitalism and Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism concerned the relationship between politics and economics within Nazi Germany – that is, in what way (and to whose benefit) the tension between productive forces and relations had been resolved. Neumann holds that the solution came from within monopoly capitalism itself, that the limitless expansionary potential of production had helped foster and continued to drive an opportunist government which shared its ambition of total domination and was willing and able to destroy all institutions which prevented expansion. He argues in Behemoth that the ‘planned’ economy is bureaucratic smoke and mirrors designed to obscure the true seats of power, four distinct but overlapping ruling interests which existed inside National Socialist Germany. Neumann argues that the Nazis never intended to dominate industry, because they realized that they lacked both the manpower and the technical ability to control monopoly capitalism.
Pollock, by contrast, argues that not only was the total management of industry by the state possible, but that this degree of management was the only solution to the disparity which had been created. While Pollock agrees that National Socialism owed its rise to monopoly capitalism during the Weimar Republic, he argues that this monopoly capitalism was in the process of being completely transformed into an entirely new form of capitalism: State Capitalism. State Capitalism is defined by the existence of a general plan, a ‘conscious decision on ends and means’ which dictates all aspects of the economy (Pollock, 1941: 204). This general plan replaces the ‘laws’ of traditional capitalism with the Tayloristic principles of scientific management. In other words, the natural, fate-like quality of capitalism posited since Smith had been stripped away, leaving a fully rationalized machine. Administrative techniques learned during monopoly capitalism replace the ‘occult’ arts of predicting consumer buying patterns and market fluctuations, making ‘total production control technically possible’ (Pollock, 1941: 208). This change ‘signifies the transition from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era’, with the state assuming the primary functions of the economy (Pollock, 1941: 203, 207). One of the fundamental assertions of State Capitalism is that competitive capitalism is an inherently inefficient and wasteful system, one which squanders resources on overproduction and bad investments. These shortcomings are mitigated through the implementation of a fully rationalized economy operating under the guidance of a central planning committee. Inefficiencies still occur, but when they do, they are a burden shouldered by society as a whole as opposed to a crushing blow delivered to a single entrepreneurial endeavor. Pollock sees State Capitalism as a purely technical apparatus, neutral machinery which was theoretically applicable to any industrialized economy and compatible with any form of government. State Capitalism could just as easily assist a democracy to emancipate humankind from the inequities of traditional capitalism as enable National Socialism to perfect its imperial war machine and the domination of the masses (Pollock, 1941: 201). Because State Capitalism contained none of the inherent internal instabilities of competitive capitalism, Pollock argues that, in the theoretical absence of external interference, it could last indefinitely. State Capitalism was an economic system still in the process of forming, but worryingly, if achieved by the National Socialists, it could provide an economic engine which could make the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ a reality.
It is useful at this juncture to turn to a mode of analysis inspired by Dubiel and Söllner’s concept of the Gesamtgestalt as developed in ‘Die Nationalsozialismusforschung des Instituts für Sozialforschung – ihre wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Stellung und ihre gegenwärtige Bedeutung’ [The National Socialism Research of the Institute for Social Research – Its Historical Status and Its Current Significance] (Dubiel and Söllner, 1981). In this essay, working against the centrifugal pressures of ‘great names’ scholarship and the publishing practice of collected works, they suggest that the various studies of fascism created by members of the Frankfurt School are best understood in the interdisciplinary context in which they emerged. Dubiel and Söllner argue that as a ‘discursive Gesamtgestalt’, collectively the Frankfurt School achieved ‘an as of yet unsurpassed level of fascism research’ (Dubiel and Söllner, 1981: 7). When read in this context, the State Capitalism debate is significant as a defining moment for the Institute’s theory as a whole, pushing the group collectively towards the outer limits of their shared theoretical base. Neumann was so horrified by the prospect of an eternal fascist economy that he dove ever deeper into the minutiae of Nazi bureaucracy and economics, searching for proof that the laws of the economy were still in effect and with them internal contradictions inherent to the capitalist system. The second section of Behemoth, dedicated exclusively to economic analysis, is formulated explicitly as a refutation of State Capitalism. It was through confrontation with the imagined perfection of State Capitalism that Neumann was forced to examine the materiality of the mode of production, to tighten the connection between the mode of production and the form of government by granting agency not only to the monopolists but also to the matter which they produced. Neumann’s analysis of the imperialist force of the polymer borrows from Gurland’s essay ‘Technological Trends and Economic Structure under National Socialism’ (Gurland, 1941). This essay links competitive capitalism with steam energy, ‘non-competitive’ capitalism with electric power, and totalitarian capitalism with ‘the preponderance of chemical processes’, also in an attempt to disprove the assertion that ‘economic dynamism has come to an end in our time’ (Gurland, 1941: 226). By highlighting the material agency of the mode of production, Gurland and Neumann hope to demonstrate both the continued influence of the economic on the political and the impossibility of a ‘neutral’ bureaucracy repurposing the monopolistic manufacturing process for different political ends.
The claim that the differences between State Capitalism and Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism can be reduced to an argument over semantics must be discarded in light of very real differences in the conception of the relationship between the political realm and the mode of production. Similarly, the existence of two distinct ‘fronts’ within the Institute also loses credibility under scrutiny. Horkheimer helped define and establish the concept of State Capitalism within the Institute but completely disagreed with Pollock that it represented ‘neutral’ machinery equally suited to totalitarian and democratic ends, or, relatedly, that the inevitability of State Capitalism meant that it was the theorist’s task to discover its best implementation. Horkheimer categorized this approach as a form of progressive fatalism, one which inadvertently advanced natural forces of domination (Horkheimer, 1981: 66–7). For the same reason, Horkheimer rejected Neumann’s optimism that continued class antagonisms within Nazi Germany would inevitably produce resistance and systemic failure, arguing that emancipation could never be the result of a mechanistic process and must instead be a conscious choice to step outside natural laws (Horkheimer, 1981: 69–70). Similarly, although both Kirchheimer and Gurland opposed the idea of State Capitalism, they developed a concept of ‘technical rationality’ which similarly asserted that National Socialism represented the application of the scientific techniques of Taylorism to the body politic, with the important difference that they interpreted this phenomenon as the subjugation of the political will to economic domination (see Kirchheimer, 1972; Gurland, 1941). Finally, Marcuse does not represent a middle ground between camps but, rather, the fluid, ambivalent and nuanced quality characteristic of all participants. On the one hand, he denies the narrative of reduced governmental interference during the liberal period advocated by Pollock and to a lesser extent Horkheimer, but, on the other, he suggests that the ‘technics’ of control developed during monopoly capitalism are neutral and can be utilized towards the enslavement or the liberation of humankind (Marcuse, 1941: 414). The Gesamtgestalt of a Frankfurt School theory of fascism can only take shape when these important subtleties are resolved into a mutually extending constellation, one which can accommodate both Horkheimer’s critique of mechanistic progress as well as Neumann’s material economic analysis. The many theoretical features shared within the Institute suggest that such a constellation is possible, but as yet a comprehensive scholarly attempt has not been made.
The term ‘totalitarianism’ emerged in the 1920s, but totalitarianism as a distinct field of study would only develop post-Second World War, reaching its zenith during the Cold War. Experts on the Frankfurt School often accuse totalitarianism studies of either ignoring the wealth of research afforded by the Frankfurt School into the authoritarian personality and fascism or of taking many of its central claims without citing or acknowledging their source. While totalitarian studies do owe a debt to the work of Franz Neumann and others, it is not sheer ingratitude or a lack of scholarly rigor which prevents them from linking totalitarianism studies with earlier works on fascism. Rather, the Frankfurt School theories on fascism operate within an entirely different set of assumptions, one which is often antinomical to those of totalitarianism. This fundamental difference is already inscribed in the fact that, generally speaking, the Institute avoided the use of the term ‘totalitarianism’, and when it was used, such usage was ‘tentative, experimental and ambivalent’ (Jones, 1999: 17). The reason for this discomfort becomes clear when the field is viewed as a whole. In his essay ‘Totalitarismus Theorie’ [Totalitarianism Theory], Söllner enumerates three key points which all totalitarianism theories seem to share: (1) the equation of National Socialism with Stalinism; (2) a concentration on the political system and the specific methods of domination; and (3) the normative comparison between totalitarianism and an idealized Western democratic state (Söllner, 2007: 230). Often the Marxist background of the theorists is indicated as a major stumbling block for adopting totalitarianism theory, with scholars such as Peter Hayes condemning as leftist bias their unwillingness to recognize Soviet Russia as coequal with Nazi Germany. An alternative explanation would seem to be that they limited their studies to National Socialism because of personal experience and superior knowledge of German political systems. This explanation gains credibility when one considers that, unlike other Marxist thinkers, the Frankfurt School conspicuously avoided supporting the Soviet Union, a critique in the negative which was then positively restated after the war. Furthermore, Marxism did play a role in the rejection of totalitarianism, not as a source of undue loyalty to Stalin but, rather, as a source of critique for the normative ideal of liberal democracy. What all of the Frankfurt School theories shared was the conviction that fascism had emerged not as an external threat to liberal capitalist society but as an immanent product thereof. It is impossible to sustain the binary us-vs-them mentality which totalitarianism demands when one recognizes that the same forces that produced repressive political domination are active in one’s own society.
To give a concrete example of this theoretical incompatibility, of Friedrich and Brzezinski’s canonical six elements of a totalitarian state, Behemoth contradicts half of the elements and is ambiguous towards the remainder (Brzenzinki and Friedrich, 1956: 9–10). Neumann disallows any unifying ideology, arguing instead that the National Socialists were opportunists with a series of rotating mastheads used to rally support. Neumann further denies not only the existence of a central planned economy but even of a total state as such, instead developing the model of overlapping and competing jurisdictions for which Behemoth is named. Despite these fundamental differences with totalitarian studies as it would later develop, Neumann does use the term ‘totalitarian’ for Behemoth’s most important concept: Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism. By pairing ‘totalitarian’ with ‘monopoly capital’, Neumann fundamentally contradicts its accepted meaning; again, this is not a totalitarianism of the state but, rather, of lived experience. Property, labor and life no longer belonged to the individual but to the employer, the party, the bureaucracy or the military by turns. Processes of massification dislodge the individual from the protective situatedness of family, class and religion. All mediating institutions are liquidated in order to destroy spontaneity and increase atomization to the extent that the masses became another infinitely malleable resource, ready to be formed into soldier, worker or corpse as necessary, completely ‘amenable to control from above’ (Neumann, 1944: 436).
Neumann’s use of ‘totalitarian’ is fundamentally incompatible with the classical understanding of the term because it denies the existence of a centralized state as well as the domination of the economy by political forces. Furthermore, by emphasizing continuity from the German Empire through the Weimar Republic to National Socialism, Neumann, like his Frankfurt School colleagues, rejects the unreflective opposition of totalitarian with liberal states, since the monopolistic system of production which created fascism was active within both. This basic incompatibility, however, does not preclude the possibility of Behemoth having served as an often unaccredited source of inspiration for later studies of totalitarianism, and several works of scholarship have been dedicated to tracing this kind of influence. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1966) in particular has often been singled out for scrutiny, most likely because it remains one of the most brilliant and influential interpretations of National Socialism ever written. Essays such as Söllner’s ‘Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism in its Original Context’ (Söllner, 2004) and Vicky Iakovou’s ‘Totalitarianism as a Non-state’ (Iakovou, 2009) attempt to demonstrate the debt Arendt owes to Neumann based on the significant similarities between Arendt’s depiction of the totalitarian state and Behemoth. Despite Arendt only directly citing the work twice, Iakovou describes Behemoth as a ‘permanent, privileged, if implicit, source’ within Origins. Many central features of Arendt’s analysis, such as the shapelessness of the non-state, the replacement of the restrictive concept of the nation state with the expansionist idea of the racial people, and the focus on the party as a movement, are either adapted from or parallel with remarkable consistency Neumann’s arguments. While such attempts to uncover hidden or buried connections with Behemoth are useful in restoring an intellectual history, the danger of ‘contextualizing’ Origins in this manner is that it tends to suppress or trivialize those aspects which made it the paradigm-shattering success that it was and is. Despite Söllner’s professed interest in preserving the work’s ‘originality’ and ‘dynamism’, over the course of his essay this ‘originality’ is reduced to sales tactics, literary embellishment and philosophical exaggeration married to personal experience. His critique culminates with the troubling accusation that Origins failed to generate ‘consequential’ further research in the same manner as Neumann’s Behemoth, and that Origins has possibly even impeded the production of ‘disinterested… historical or social-scientific… research on totalitarian societies’ (Söllner, 2004: 234, 235). Rather than ‘contextualizing’ Origins, I would argue for expanding Söllner’s own concept of the Gesamtgestalt to include Arendt, since this is a model which highlights shared theoretical assumptions while accentuating those features unique to the individual theories.
Despite the aforementioned shared features of Origins and Behemoth, there is a major obstacle to any kind of collaborative project such as the one proposed. Hannah Arendt’s Nazi Germany is an ideologically dominated world, one organized around an entirely new rationality which is beyond capitalist interests. By contrast, Neumann’s Behemoth argues that the ideology of the Nazi party is an internally inconsistent and opportunistic sham concocted with the sole purpose of hiding its true motivating forces and power structure, which remain those of monopoly capital. Putting the question of ideology momentarily to one side, the theoretical divide over the role of capitalism alone seems insurmountable. However, this difference is more apparent than real, as Arendt and Neumann do not disagree over capitalism as such but over the role of profit and self-interest. Despite declaring Nazi Germany to be a post-capitalist society, Arendt grants capitalism a privileged position in establishing the dynamics of totalitarian rule not unlike that granted by Neumann. When discussing imperialism, one of the origins of totalitarianism, she notes that the concept of expansion defining imperialism is ‘not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production’ (Arendt, 1966: 125). Imperialist expansion only occurs once the process of production slows as the result of encountering national borders, i.e. political resistance. It is at this moment that the expansion demanded by capitalist production is transferred into the political realm, ‘for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits’ (Arendt, 1966: 146). Arendt is then able to claim that the expansionary drive in National Socialism has ceased to be capitalist because she creates the rather fine division between the accumulation of power vs the accumulation of profit, but the internal dynamics remain identical with those of capital accumulation. Arendt sees this expansion as an endless process which can know no peace and recognizes no political or social boundaries, one which is in perpetual need of ‘more material to devour’ (Arendt, 1966: 146).
Arendt and Neumann’s theories of anti-Semitism are likewise similar in their reliance on metaphors of limitless expansion derived from economic models, while remaining divided on the role of economics limited to the pursuit of profit. Neumann argues that the Jews represented ‘a testing ground for universal terrorist methods’, a subject on which methods of absolute domination and atomization could be tried before being applied to other, ever expanding enemies (Neumann, 1944: 551). The anti-Semitism of the Nazis was merely the ‘Spearhead of Terror’; while this may seem to underestimate the specificity and the intensity of the Jew hatred of the Nazis, it is important to remember that Arendt was also at pains to indicate that the eradication of the Jews represented a first step in a process of human destruction that would have no end. The concentration camps for her were laboratories of domination, the true expression of Nazi rationality in which a new humankind was being forged and whose reach was constantly growing, as demonstrated by the inclusion of Germans with heart conditions in the lists for extermination by the end of the war (Arendt, 1966: 451). Similar to Arendt, Neumann saw anti-Semitism as both an integrative tool for domestic policy through the production of collective guilt, while also serving as an export product designed to undermine the foundational values of liberal democratic enemies. Neumann substantiates this with a quote from Nazi ideologue Werner Best: ‘“A country that surrenders to anti-Semitism has thereby already surrendered its liberal tradition. It has abandoned its bulwark against totalitarianism”’ (Neumann, 1944: 521). This is a current of anti-Semitism very similar to the phenomenon described by Arendt in which anti-Semitism is exported through the expulsion of the ‘penniless Jew’, thereby seemingly lending credence to Nazi discrimination against a ‘useless’ people (Arendt, 1966: 415). The purpose here is not merely to demonstrate similarity but to show that the language and dynamics of capital expansion expressed elsewhere continue to inform and structure even those moments either unmarked or coded specifically as beyond capitalism, simply because they defy the logic of profit accumulation.
Part of what makes Neumann’s analysis of anti-Semitism interesting, however, is that he does connect his theory to explicitly economic motivations. Neumann argues that, in part, anti-Semitism served as a financial diversion, a means of realizing some of the anti-capitalist promises of Nazi ideology while leaving the fundamental economic order intact (Neumann, 1944: 120–9). Beyond serving as a distraction, by expropriating Jewish owners of small businesses the Nazis were simultaneously able to severely weaken the middle class and strengthen the monopolistic elite in a process of ‘combing out’; the stolen businesses and goods typically proved too expensive for the Jewish businessmen’s direct competitors and were instead snatched up by major conglomerates. Neumann is always careful to avoid reducing anti-Semitism to an exclusively economic tool, but his conviction that the dynamics of capitalism worked unabated in Nazi Germany allows him to see economic consequences that are far too convenient to be incidental to the process. This approach, however, has its limits. At several junctures, he is forced to bracket off a ‘magical’, ‘totalitarian’ rationality, something which he claims defies all reason and logic. The kind of anti-Semitism he discusses is exclusively the ‘non-totalitarian’ form, ‘for the totalitarian Anti-Semite, the Jew has long ceased to be a human being. He has become the incarnation of evil in Germany, nay, in the entire world. In other words, totalitarian Anti-Semitism is magic and beyond discussion’ (Neumann, 1944: 121–2). By contrast, Arendt’s insistence on the novelty of totalitarian government enables her to create a corresponding totalitarian rationality, one which is designed to explain precisely those moments where ‘common sense’ fails, when people and institutions begin to work against the traditional rationality of self-interest. Origins is littered with examples in which confounded Nazi generals and businessmen complained that a particular initiative would be detrimental to military victory or productive efficiency, unaware that the operational logic of the party surrounding them saw such concerns as petty in comparison with the grandeur of a millennial destiny.
To recognize that moments existed in which self-interest and profit were suspended is not the same as to assert that the forces of capitalism had been rendered wholly inoperative. Arendt is so preoccupied with asserting the novelty of totalitarianism that she often slides towards essentializing the ‘outside’ world of liberal democracy, thereby creating the unreflective binary which plagues much of totalitarianism studies. This blindness seems to be the result of conflating capitalism with profit motives and self-interest, seemingly forgetting that she has elsewhere shown capitalism to be the transnational force responsible for exploding political and social boundaries, the motor of limitless expansion and destruction which served as the model for totalitarian domestic and international policy. It is at these junctures that Behemoth is illuminating, constructing a bridge of continuity between liberalism and totalitarianism, highlighting capitalism’s infinite elasticity and ability to shape the political world. Neumann, however, also lapses into reductive definitions of capitalism. He frequently pins hope for the future of Germany on a potential revolution of the working class, catalyzed by their exposure through labor to the ‘rational’ process of production. In so doing, he neglects the revolutionary discoveries of his own research: first, by underestimating the disintegrative effects monopoly capitalism has had on all mediating institutions, including class, and, second, by forgetting the nature of the ‘rationality’ produced by monopoly capitalism. The mode of production is not neutrally rational and does not lend itself to the goal of emancipation but is rather imperial and socially corrosive at the molecular level. Both Arendt and Neumann’s analyses suffer from overly narrow characterizations of the capitalist process; but when read with and against each other in a mutually extending Gesamtgestalt, the novel features of both interpretations become apparent, creating a plastic conception of Nazi Germany capable of demonstrating both the operation of a new kind of capitalism and a political model capable of exceeding it.
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