Ernst Fraenkel (political scientist)

Ernst Fraenkel (26 December 1898 – 28 March 1975) was a German political scientist. He was one of the founding fathers of German political science after World War II.

During the Weimar Republic Fraenkel was a member of the social democrats and one of the few jurists who held socialist opinions. According to some historians in the 1930s he was designated to be Attorney General of a possible social-democratic German government. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States where he began to develop his respect for the politics of that country, especially its pluralism and its checks and balances.

Fraenkel was born in a Jewish family in Cologne. He served during the First World War from 1916 to 1918 in the German Army. He wrote his dissertation in law about The void labour contract (Der nichtige Arbeitsvertrag), under Hugo Sinzheimer.

During the Weimar Republic he worked as a lawyer for labor law with Franz Leopold Neumann, published scientific publications and was engaged in socialist politics. Having been a soldier in World War I, he was still allowed to work to a limited extent even after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was connected to several resistance groups such as the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Fighting Alliance). In 1938 he finally immigrated to the United Kingdom, in 1939 to the United States.

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