Franz Leopold Neumann

Franz Leopold Neumann (May 23, 1900 – September 2, 1954) was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States. Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political science in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the literature arising out of the Venona papers, Franz L. Neumann is named as the figure behind a code word for a singularly distrusted and very short-term "spy." The political design that may have led Neumann to the actions that earned him this classification are unknown, but until his death he enjoyed and repaid the full trust of American authorities.

Neumann was born in Kattowitz (Katowice), German Empire (present day Poland). 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 Wrocław in Poland), Leipzig, , 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 explain the Socialist acceptance of Liberal individualism in this sphere, in contradiction to Socialist theory. In the academic exercise that earned his degree, he did not actually attempt the sociological study he saw as necessary but addressed preliminary philosophical issues in the neo-Kantian debates of the day. Interestingly, however, his treatment of value philosophy led him to the conclusion that the antithetical liberal and socialist arguments were equally valid, and that the Socialist deviations from consistency in the matter of punishment was politically justifiable and subject only to political management. This most abstruse exercise, accordingly, foretells his lifelong reliance on negotiated settlements even if they involved exceptions from theoretical consistency. The trick was to take care that the effects of such deviations are not cumulative—as he came to conclude about the Socialist movement's compromises in Weimar. 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 laborioust 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 1932-33 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.

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