Published in the centennial year of the Weimar Republic's founding, this book treats the work of a political thinker dedicated to that democratic experiment, and then, after its collapse, to understanding the nature of the movement that destroyed it. Appearing at a moment in which authoritarianism is again on the rise, David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland's study of Franz Neumann is a timely effort to move him from the margins of the well-known Frankfurt School, with which he was briefly associated, to center stage.

Born in Katowice in 1900, Neumann studied at the universities of Breslau, Leipzig, and Rostock before completing a law degree at Frankfurt in 1923. A committed Social Democrat, he put his legal skills at the disposal of the party and its affiliated trade unions while also teaching at the German College of Politics and maintaining a private legal practice. By the early 1930s, he was representing Social Democratic Party before Germany's highest courts. Forced into exile by the Nazis, he moved to London, where he retrained as a political scientist at the London School of Economics. Later he went to the United States, where he worked for the Frankfurt School after its relocation to New York, and then for the Office of Strategic Services, before eventually joining the faculty of Columbia University. He died in an car accident in Switzerland in 1954.

For Kettler and Wheatland, the challenge of this book is “to inquire into the bearing of Franz Neumann's work on political theory as a contemporary and continuing enterprise” (7). They do this by providing a highly detailed description and analysis of Neumann's works which, they argue, display three motifs. Firstly, Neumann combines an engagement with the existing work of great thinkers and empirical–historical observation “with a view to mobilizing thought for determinate purposes, all aiming to enlarge human freedom.” Secondly, “his theoretical models acknowledge the coexistence of variously grounded motifs, even under optimal conditions, whose interrelationships cannot be brought to consistent theoretical harmony but must be managed by the changing interplay of political actions.” And thirdly, his dedication to key elements of the social democratic program was, “grounded in Marxist analysis, together with a high priority given to liberal standards of governance” (2). The authors trace these motifs from the Weimar years, during which Neumann believed that the republican constitution provided a framework through which the SPD's parliamentary struggle for reforms and the unions’ fight for economic democracy could move Germany toward socialism, through the Nazi period, and into the years of the early Cold War, when Neumann's critique of the labor movement's—and his own—failures in the face of Nazism and communism was harsh and sweeping.

Kettler and Wheatland effectively show how, for a time, Neumann's skills as a lawyer and grant writer brought him into the orbit of Max Horkheimer's Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) in the late 1930s, but Neumann's methodological and ideological approaches to fascism placed him at odds with elements of the critical theory espoused by Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Friedrich Pollack, resulting in his dismissal in 1942. It was in that year that he published Behemoth, a massive study of the structure and practice of National Socialism, which argued that, despite the growing power of the Nazi-controlled state, at its core Germany remained a capitalist society in which the business classes were still in control and the “primacy of politics” was incomplete. The authors devote almost eighty pages to their analysis of the book and show how, despite its many controversial assertions—for example, on the role of antisemitism in German society—and certain flaws that only became clear later on, it remains worth reading.

Experience in Europe and the United States led Neumann to hold that “scholarship must not be purely theoretical and historical.” He believed, instead, that “the role of the social scientist is the reconciliation of theory and practice and that such reconciliation demands concern with and analysis of the brutal facts of life” (212). His sojourn in the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS provided a particularly blunt take on this reality: few of his recommendations regarding Central European policy were taken up by his superiors as ideological differences regarding possible Soviet intentions after the war were already in bloom. The section on Neumann's activity providing information to the Soviets, which our authors describe as illegal “breaches of organizational discipline in support of his best judgement” (350) is also interesting. Fortunately for Neumann, nothing became known of these incidents at the time.

As the war ended, Neumann played a significant role in preparing the Nuremberg prosecutions, but soon returned to academia. Based at Columbia, he remained involved in German affairs and helped to establish the Free University of Berlin. Meanwhile, he strove to promote political theory in American political science and to theorize the concepts of freedom, power, and dictatorship—projects that remained unfinished.

Kettler and Wheatland successfully remind us of Neumann's significance as a political thinker, and they show how he strove to connect theory with the “brute facts of political life” in a field dominated in the United States by empiricism. Yet the book has significant weaknesses. Overly long, detailed description and exegesis of one publication after another undercuts its readability and clarity—especially for non-specialists—as does the lack of biographical material or context. One learns little about Neumann himself or his family, and there is nothing in the book about the “making” of the Weimar intellectual, his arrest in 1933, or the circumstances of his flight from Germany and life abroad. Finally, while the notes are detailed, the lack of a bibliography is inconvenient for those seeking easy access to the sources—especially to Neumann's writings. These shortcomings are unfortunate, but do not negate the authors’ achievement in bringing the ideas of this important figure to an English-language audience.