• Marxist Theorist and Labor Lawyer Franz Leopold Neumann, 1900
  

Neumann was born in Kattowitz, Silesia. As a student Neumann supported the German November revolution of 1918 and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Neumann was instrumental in organizing the Socialist Students Society in Frankfurt am Main, where in 1918 he met Leo Löwenthal, a future colleague in the Institute for Social Research in New York under Max Horkheimer. At Breslau (the present day Wroclaw in Poland), Leipzig, Rostock and Frankfurt am Main, Neumann studied law and earned a doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on method in the theory of punishment. His main aim was to challenge the Socialist acceptance of Liberal individualism in this sphere, a tactical concession he considered inappropriate to the new rise of democratic power. He was active from 1925 to 1927 as law clerk and assistant of Hugo Sinzheimer, the foremost reformist labor law theorist, who also engaged him as a teacher at the trade union academy affiliated with the University of Frankfurt. Throughout the Weimar years, Neumann's political commitment was to the laborist wing of the Social Democratic Party. From 1928 to 1933 he worked in Berlin in partnership with Ernst Fraenkel as an attorney specializing in labor law, representing trade unions and publishing briefs and articles, and a technical book in this innovative field. In 1932 - 1933 he became lead attorney for the Social Democratic Party and published a brief, itself suppressed by the Nazis, against the suppression of the principal Social Democratic newspaper.

In the weeks after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Neumann was warned of his imminent arrest and he fled to England. There he studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and with the former Frankfurt sociology professor, Karl Mannheim. He earned a second doctorate with a study of the rise and fall of the historical epoch of the rule of law. On Laski's recommendation, Neumann was employed by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (in exile at Columbia after some years in Geneva and Paris) in 1936, initially as administrator and legal advisor, and later as research associate, although he was never as well established in the group led by the Director, Max Horkheimer, as Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno. He participated in the Institute's debates about national socialism in the New York years. His well known study of the Nazi regime, however, was written without the scrutiny of the Institute's review procedures. Neumann played an important part in helping the Institute to secure the backing of the American Jewish Committee for its well known study of anti - Semitism.

Neumann achieved his academic reputation among American scholars with the publication of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942. The thesis is that National Socialist rule is a function of continuing struggles among power groups united only by their hatred of the labor movement, and that Nazi Germany consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern political formation oriented to order and predictability. Within this framework, Neumann applied many Marxist tools of analysis to characterize the prime social component in the inner struggle. . Behemoth made a major impact on the young sociologist C. Wright Mills, who later claimed that Behemoth gave him the "tools to grasp and analyze the entire total structure and as a warning of what could happen in a modern capitalistic democracy." While opinions differed about his theses, his mastery of German sources and rich empirical documentation drew applause from established American political scientists, and the book prepared the way for his later university career.

More immediately, the reception of Behemoth laid the foundation for his successful wartime career in Washington, when the Institute's leadership declared itself financially unable to retain his services. Until the first months of 1943, Neumann served as part time consultant to the Board of Economic Warfare, staffing routine studies of trade patterns. Neumann then became deputy chief of the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, amid numerous younger American professors, seconded to Washington for the duration. The position also allowed him to place a number of his Institute associates, who had been, like himself, declared redundant by the core group around Horkheimer.

Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer worked on numerous projects, including the analysis of political tendencies in Germany. They were "specifically assigned to the identification of Nazi and anti - Nazi groups and individuals; the former were to be held accountable in the war crimes adjudication then being negotiated between the four Great Powers, and the latter were to be called upon for cooperation in post war reconstruction. For his source materials he drew upon official and military intelligence reports, extensive OSS interviews with refugees, and special OSS agents and contacts in occupied Europe; it was his duty to evaluate the reliability of each of the items of intelligence that reached him, and assemble them all into a coherent analysis of points of strength and weakness in the Reich." At the end of 1944, Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer were involved in preparing materials for use by eventual occupation authorities, including a Denazification Guide. Most of this effort was rendered irrelevant by the priorities of the incipient Cold War policies at the end of the war. Neumann was detached from Washington Service for almost a year until September 1945 to assist the head of OSS in preparing for the War Crimes Prosecutions. Just before the beginning of the trials, Neumann returned to Washington, to take up a position on the Central European Desk of the Department of State.

In the service of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal under chief prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson, Neumann was tasked with preparing an analysis of each of the twenty - two Nuremberg defendants, and various Nazi organizations. From mid September 1945, Neumann’s R&A team prepared and supervised materials for a series of indictments with other OSS colleagues responsible for both interrogation and document analysis. William Joseph Donovan initially directed Neumann to examine religious persecution other than against Jews under the Nazi regime. The report's analysis of "the problem of establishing criminal responsibility" contributed to the prosecutorial strategy. The thinking was to show that measures taken against the Christian Churches were an integral part of National Socialism. It also attempted to show that measures were criminal from the standpoint of German or international law, depending where a given act was committed. The report claimed key articles of the Weimar Constitution "were never formally abrogated by the National Socialist regime, … were left untouched and still remain theoretically in force." Furthermore, "respect for the principle of religious freedom" continued to be reiterated in various official policy statements of the Nazi regime, and in various "enactments of the National Socialist state, particularly the Concordat of 20 July 1933."

The material on religious persecution is placed in the wider context of how these agencies committed crimes against humanity as an integral part of the Nazi’s master plan, its conspiracy to seize and consolidate ideological control and totalitarian power within Germany by eradicating sources of actual and potential opposition. This material formed part of the evidence on which these agencies were judged to be criminal organizations. Neumann's group wrote,

The emphasis on the persecution of Christian churches rather than on the far more destructive actions against Jews was a matter of strategic and political decision by the four party prosecution.

Neumann also took charge of revising the first draft prosecution brief detailing the personal responsibility of Hermann Göring, the most senior defendant. Neumann believed that German war criminals should be tried before German courts according to Weimar law as an important part of the wider denazification effort.

Like other disillusioned veterans of the Weimar Social Democratic Party, Neumann hoped for a more radical, unified labor and Socialist movement in the immediate post war period, but he quickly accepted the view shared among his old party associates in Berlin that the Communists' subservience to the Russians required the Social Democratic Party to pursue an independent course.

In 1948 Neumann became a professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and helped establish the Free University of Berlin. In the United States, Neumann was highly regarded at Columbia University and he played a prominent part in attempts by the Rockefeller Foundation to strengthen political theory as a component of political science in American universities. He published several seminal articles arising out of his attempts to develop a democratic theory consonant with modern political and social changes. Although this project remained unfinished, he contributed important studies of the concepts of dictatorship, power and freedom. The study of modern dictatorships, he contended, revealed the dangers to democracy arising from the pervasive anxiety incident to modern society and showed the need, first, to approach the problem of power from the positive standpoint he thought implicit in the tradition of Rousseau (not liberal fears), and, second, to recognize that freedom entailed rational knowledge of social realities and a mental sense of empowerment (what the older moral philosophy called 'active virtue'), as well as a sphere of protected personal, social (communications), and political (status activus) rights. As with Behemoth the force of Neumann's argument depended as much on the richness and realism of his political diagnoses as on the contestable theses he put forward.

Neumann died in an automobile accident in Visp, Switzerland, in 1954. His widow, Inge Werner, married his closest friend and intellectual companion, Herbert Marcuse, in 1955. Franz's oldest son, Osha Thomas Neumann, became a member of the anarchist affinity group Motherfucker during the 60s, and then a prominent civil rights attorney in Berkeley, California. Michael Neumann, his younger son, became a logician and radical political philosopher, professor of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.