MARXISM, LAW, AND SOCIAL CHANGE: THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF FRANZ NEUMANN

This dissertation discusses the nature and significance of the political thought of Franz Neumann. The development of Neumann's political thought is traced in detail--a development that began with his work as a young labor lawyer working in Berlin during the 1920's and continued through his years at Columbia where he was a professor of government at the time of his death in 1954.;The dissertation focuses on Neumann's attempts to understand and clarify the nature of social and political freedom, as well as his attempt to contribute to its fullest possible realization. Throughout a good deal of his career Neumann considered himself a Marxist; Marxism was his primary tool of political and social analysis and he equated Marxist communism with the maximization of political and social freedom. The dissertation details a series of three major stages that Neumann's thought seems to have progressed through--each stage is marked by a different interpretation of Marxism by Neumann, as well as a different estimation of the degree of freedom that can be realized in modern society.;The first stage lasted from the time that Neumann began practising law until he left Germany in 1933. During this period Neumann's interpretation of Marx was highly influenced by the work of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, leading figures in the Austrian Social Democratic Party, who put forward an interpretation of Marxism that emphasized the role of a slow, evolutionary social and political transition from capitalism to socialism. Neumann was introduced to the work of these "Austro-Marxists" by his teacher, Hugo Sinzheimer, who used the work of Renner to help define and legitimize the legal changes necessary for the development of modern German labor law. Neumann and other students of Sinzheimer tried during this period to help forge a system of "collective democracy" for Germany which would provide for greater participation by the working class in decisions regarding the economy, and serve as a political transition between capitalism and socialism.;With the Nazi takeover in Germany, Neumann entered into the second phase of the development of his political thought. He quickly came to believe that National Socialism signaled the last stage of capitalism. The legal, evolutionary development of socialism in Germany had become impossible in Neumann's eyes and he accepted the necessity of revolution. In doing so he rejected the "evolutionary" Marxism that he had embraced during the Weimar years. Neumann's influential war-time analysis of National Socialism, Behemoth, expressed his new, more orthodox Marxist views.;After the war Neumann entered the third phase of the development of his political ideas. In post-war publications he made clear that an accurate analysis of political developments in Germany would undercut Marx's solution to the problem of how freedom might be fully realized in modern society. From 1949 to 1953 Neumann examined other ways of solving this problem, and he found them all unsatisfactory. Finally he urged support for "liberal democratic" government as a mixture of pure democratic and classic liberal notions of government. Neumann concluded that this form of government, although imperfect, was the best practical way of approaching the ideal of maximum freedom under present conditions.;The development of Neumann's political thought involved a series of careful attempts to deal with the most serious theoretical difficulties faced by Marxists after World War I. As such, it illustrates many inadequacies of Marxism, as well as many of the difficulties involved in defining and securing political and social freedom in modern society.