Post on 21-Feb-2023
Exile as Process: The Case of FranzL. Neumann
David KettlerBard College
Reading Script: MPSA, April 25, 2010
1. The study of exile is burdened by conceptual
disputes about the displaced persons who are to be
classed as exiles rather than refugees or émigrés
or emigrants or cosmopolitans or members of a
diaspora. The disputes are an indicator, first, of
the political weights variously attached to the
term—ranging from the disgrace of the expelled
kleptocrat to the celebration of the freedom
fighter—and, second, to the historical place of the
trope in metaphorical or symbolic senses in
numerous religious, aesthetic, and other cultural
contexts—ranging from the sacral privileged status
of the Christian or Jew awaiting the ultimate
restoration to the elevated distance occupied by
the creative artist. The issues are further
complicated by the circumstance that the contested
concepts figure in many of the variations in the
claims and counter-claims constitutive of the
displaced condition, so that persons seeking asylum
may claim refugee status and deny that they are
exiles, lest they be excluded as likely disturbers
of the political order or policies of the host
state, while individuals seeking recognition as
agents and allies in political ventures will assert
their status as exiles and reject the passive
victimization implied by the term refugee.
2. In the present report, I will not address the
problem of relating the extended cultural trope of
exile to the concrete political phenomena subject
to characterization as exile, except insofar as I
want to reiterate the position that I developed in
earlier papers, viz., that in these contexts it is
misleading to treat exile as symbol rather than as
metaphor, since the latter keeps open important
questions that the former imperiously closes. My
principal aim in this study is to change the terms
of the dispute about the specification of exile by
suggesting that these diverse modes of displacement
are best recognized not as static classificatory
boxes but as overlapping regions on a multi-
dimensional continuum along which individuals and
groups may move—by virtue of their own changing
designs and actions, their variable and often
contested recognition by others, and, above all, as
a function of the bargaining between the displaced
and others, including not only the hosts but also
one another and those who remained behind in their
places of departure.
3. The exile zone, as I understand it, is marked,
first, by the circumstance that its most
characteristic inhabitants had been actors within
the political or more general public space before
their displacement. Rather than thinking of exile
as an ouster from “home,” I think of it rather as a
separation from a “scene of action,” as the
eighteenth century called it, and from fellow
actors. This is the place from which exiles are
displaced. The urban intellectuals whose exiles
are my special focus—as they are the focus of most
exile studies—have commonly left home long before.
I qualify this condition in two ways because it is
of course possible that individuals who were not in
fact active in the original place may come to be
recognized as exiles by the others, and because
areas of public space that are not strictly
political are deemed to be equivalent in
politicized cultures.
4. Second, exile is the product of “political
justice” in some significant sense, although this
is by no means limited to formal acts of
banishment. Specific threats or restrictions or
impositions by acts of public power may also be
implementations of decision analogous to a legal
judgment but shaped by a political rather than
legal calculus.
5. Third, there are common stylistic features of
life in exile, ranging from the most direct case of
active participation in collective exile groups
expressly dedicated to elimination of the
conditions that made for displacement to more
individualized engagements to furthering such
change.
6. The possibility of collective exile groups opens
a whole new set of questions about the relations
between exiles and the foreign policies of the host
countries. They may support such formations as
instruments of their own designs or they may
actively oppose the the emergence of such activist
political entities for the same kinds of reasons.
These considerations were critical in the dealings
between the anti-Fascist exile and the Soviet
Union, as well as the consequences of these
relations for undertakings in other countries.
There are good reasons to think—taking a more
recent case—that American agencies pursued an
active policy, in conjunction with foundations and
other groups, to prevent the formation of a
collective exile among student exiles from Hungary
after the 1956 rebellion, in view of their
professed socialist inclinations and their anti-
Soviet rage at a time of détente policies.
7. Invariably the style of exile entails an
orientation to return. To speak of a
characteristic style or orientation is to include
qualities of thought and speech that may obviously
vary greatly in form, intensity, and other
elements, and that may assume more importance in
some contexts than others.
8. My procedure in the paper is to follow the
career of one representative figure from among the
political intellectuals displaced by Nazi rule,
Franz L. Neumann. I begin with an overview of his
career. Then I will touch briefly on Neumann’s own
reflections on his place in the company of those
who came to the United States as exiles. And
finally I will look at two critical and I think
characteristic features of his movement through the
exile process.
9. In this oral report, I will concentrate on the
second of these topics, with only a pointer in the
direction of the others. To anticipate the last
points, which take up the bulk of the written paper,
I want to call attention first to a limitation of the
analytical acuity with which exiles like other
strangers are often credited and for which Neumann
was especially well known. The sociologist, Nina
Rubinstein, has suggested that exiles often fail to
create a new history for the place they left behind:
they do not amend their views of the past in the
light of the events that they missed. More to the
point: they fail to imagine a new future. In
Neumann’s case, as in the case of a number of his
colleagues in the practice of labor law and policy
during the Weimar years, this yields an exaggerated
view of the importance of labor movements in the
shaping of events, past and future.
10. Yet even if these are indeed accidents common to
exiles’ styles of thought, these obstacles to the
flexible realism that Rubinstein used as a standard
are not necessarily obstacles to understanding in all
senses. Like caricatures—or utopias—these ways of
seeing, especially as they are typically animated by
deep convictions of ethical seriousness and profound
affections of the heart, disrupt banality and
complacency. Knowing matters desperately. Perhaps
precisely these wounds help to explain the
extraordinary success of the German intellectual and
cultural emigrants of the Hitler era as inspiring
teachers, a quality often noted but too rarely
examined.
11. Second, and this is in part a legacy of that
same career but critical for the shaping of all
effective action and movement along the continuum
in which exile is a major feature, Neumann was a
brilliant and persistent negotiator, who had the
ability to create and adjust the multi-directional
bargaining relations and flexible settlements that
are a necessity for the displaced, who find nothing
ready-made. For the emigrants, whether in the
humane and social sciences or in literature and the
arts, acculturation was a very difficult and always
incomplete negotiation, with generational memories
and intellectual linkages frequently disrupting the
settlements that were made.
12. In the course of a retrospective consideration
of the role of social scientists exiled from Nazi
Germany written not long before his premature
death, Neumann proposes a characterization of his
own vocation. Neumann speaks of “political
scholars,” deliberately conjoining the senses of
the scholar who studies politics and the scholar
who is political. Using a more generic term,
Neumann defines political scholars, first, as
“those intellectuals dealing with problems of state
and society—historians, sociologists,
psychologists, political scientists—who were—or
should have been—compelled to deal with the brute
facts of politics”; and, second, as intellectuals
who “being political… fought—or should have fought—
actively for a better, more decent political
system.” Neumann’s explication of this concept—at
once normative and descriptive—is a prime motif in
his historical approach to the problem of
intellectuals in exile, which he offers as context
for a consideration of his own cohort of emigrants.
13. Neumann begins with a normative imperative
addressed to all intellectuals. They are to be
proponents of an expansion of freedom, which
implies, first, that they must always stand in a
critical relationship to their times, since freedom
can never be fully achieved in any political and
social regime. And this vocation for the advocacy
of freedom also requires, second, that they must
stand in a distanced relationship from the
constraining institutions of the political and
social order within whose boundaries they find
themselves: they must be in some sense metics. In
the context of the public lecture that is the
source of this text, Neumann offers little more
than two problematic rhetorical references to some
passages in Plato to support this postulated ideal.
He quotes Socrates in the Republic on the notion of
the philosopher as metic, apparently without
acknowledging that the argument in the text moves
on to the obligation of the philosopher
nevertheless to assume a civic responsibility.
From the Crito, he extracts another quotation that
appears to underline the distance between the
philosopher and his community, notwithstanding the
overall thrust of Socrates’ argument that he must
bow to an unjust death sentence rather than to deny
his city. It is impossible to say whether Neumann
intentionally chose passages that highlighted some
paradoxes in the normative guideline he proposes
for intellectuals—and it must be said that this
would not be his usual way with quotations—yet the
difficulties might be said to be immanent in the
very idea of the “political scholar,” as this
figure is situated by Neumann in a sequence of
historical contexts, and specifically as it is
subjected to exile.
14. The actual situation of intellectuals, as they
may be subjected to exile, is variously constituted
by the changing role of intellectuals, according to
Neumann, as well as by variable social settings.
Because the historical appearances of some older
types play a part in Neumann’s characterization of
his own cohort—and because the approach to problems
by some sort of historical genealogy is so central
to Neumann’s approach in political theory—it is
worth reviewing his typology. His periodization is
quite conventional. In the classical era, he
maintains, there is an identity of politics and
culture, so that exile means death to an
intellectual. Neumann’s eagerness to invoke a
familiar limiting case, it appears, leads him to
neglect both the thesis of the intellectual as metic
—as he might have illustrated it, for instance, by
Aristotle—and the political reality of the
difference between the cultural and political
boundaries of the Greek city-states of antiquity.
The contrast model he wanted to highlight probably
accounts for that radical simplification. In the
Hellenistic and Roman periods, he asserts, culture
and politics could be separated from one another,
as was the case with the Epicurean philosophers,
but exile was nevertheless “intellectually
catastrophic.” This construct and his harsh but
quite specific criticism of it is especially
interesting because it is arguable that in
Neumann’s more pessimistic periods, especially
towards the end of his career, he sometimes appears
to be fighting off an Epicurean distance from
political tasks and hopes.
15. Neumann introduces the construct of “political
scholar” in conjunction with his initial discussion
of Christianity. Generally speaking, he says, the
universal culture of Christianity, with its common
language, allows intellectuals to move freely from
a situation where they are not wanted to another,
where they may be welcome. But the situation is
different for political scholars like Dante and
Marsilius of Padua, who are seriously affected by
their displacement from their original locales.
Yet such figures also had the opportunity to
convert their losses into gains, as they were both
motivated and freed to reflect deeply on their
dilemmas and thus to make major contributions to
political theory. The contrast to the Epicurean
type of displaced intellectual—and the optimistic
foreshadowing of possibilities—could not be more
stark.
16. In the further development of Christian types
and contexts, however, Neumann conjures up two
additional situations. First, there is the
circumstance arising when Christianity redefines
its constituent bounded units as sacral religious
communities, whose opponents are enemies who
pollute the faith and deserve “extermination” not
merely in the old sense of ouster from within
boundaries, but in the new sense of annihilation.
This reunification of culture and politics is found
as well where there is a “civil religion” in the
sense of Rousseau and the Reign of Terror, and
indeed, according to Neumann, wherever society is
united by faith rather than reason. A second quite
different form arising in Christian societies
anticipates a contrary more modern set of
circumstances. Intellectuals in the earlier
context can play church off against state and
maneuver freely within flexible limits of heresy
and political dissent, especially in view of their
individual mobility and their collective protection
by transpolitical corporations. The counterparts
under the condition of modern states are the
intellectuals with special skills who move freely
from court to court in the early years of
absolutism as well as “uprooted intellectuals” like
Bakunin and Marx, who find shelters in various
locales as needed—and whose examples in some sense
epitomize the normative condition of the
intellectual as outsider and critic.
17. The paradigm of the free intellectual last
mentioned presupposes the development of the modern
state, which creates a new ambiguity for
intellectuals, and even the rise of the nation
state, where new factors militate against such
independence. While the modern state, as it arises
in the Sixteenth Century, increasingly limits
itself in principle to providing security for
cultural and social processes that achieve great
gains by their own autonomous dynamic, it also
insists on its sole control over the question of
what counts as “security” and what is required to
maintain it. This circumstance makes possible
unprecedented liberty for intellectual exploration
and dissent, but also produces abrupt and arbitrary
incursions on that liberty. With the mobilization
of “nationality” increasingly comprehended in an
ideology of nationalism as a frame of legitimacy,
the tensions worsen. Yet in the absence of a civil
religion the demands of such states are commonly
limited to the avoidance of disruptive public
interventions, and they therefore leave room for a
kind of “inner emancipation”—or even “inner
emigration”—exemplified by figures like Spinoza,
the Abbe Meslier, Kant, and Theodor Mommsen, where
intellectuals are outwardly compliant but maintain
an inward rebellion and produce hidden dissenting
works, often of great value. Although Neumann does
not use the expression “political scholar” to
identify intellectuals of this kind, they clearly
approximate, like the uprooted intellectuals, to
this ideal—albeit within the constraints of their
powerlessness.
18. In the course of development of the modern
nation state, according to Neumann, even these
ambiguous openings are increasingly closed shut,
first of all, by the bureaucratization of
intellectual roles and their transformation into
intellectual professions. Neumann curiously cites
Julien Benda’s “La Trahison des Clercs” as an authority
for this observation, although Benda’s actual
concern is rather with the “politicization of the
intellectuals.” One interesting possibility is
that Neumann is here telescoping two stages of an
argument that can actually be found in an article
by his sometime teacher, Karl Mannheim,
notwithstanding Neumann’s general acceptance during
his years with the Institute for Social Research in
New York of the Horkheimer’s group’s hostility to
Mannheim. In a lecture to Dutch students, first
given and published in 1932 but doubtless repeated
in substance in the classes Mannheim gave and
Neumann attended at the London School two years
later, Mannheim rejects Benda’s objections to the
“politicized” intellectual and argues instead that
intellectuals must accept responsibility for
political thinking and political education, and
that the genuine threat to the freedom of the human
spirit is rather the transmutation of
intellectual’s thought into the thinking of
functionaries. This comes very close to Neumann’s
actual confrontation between the political scholar
and the bureaucratization of function and thought.
In view of the “political scholar’s” attention—as
well as Neumann’s own—to the “brute facts of
power,” however, that antithesis proves to be more
vexing in Neumann’s thought and practice than might
be supposed from the present exposition. The
simpler but more fearsome outcome of this line of
development is the state of affairs in totalitarian
states, where irresistible pressure is exerted to
coordinate all thought and culture and attempts to
seek refuge in “inner emigration” are condemned to
sterility. For intellectuals, according to
Neumann, this condition leaves no alternative to
their physical emigration.
19. In making this flat assertion about the vacuity
of “inner emigration” under totalitarian
conditions, Neumann is registering a belated
judgment on an issue bitterly debated in Germany
since the end of the war and largely decided
against the external emigrants in most intellectual
circles in the German Federal Republic. When he
turns to the emigrants, however, he makes it clear
that the phase of the nation state also importantly
shaped the destinies of intellectuals who resisted
bureaucratization. He stresses how closely tied
the intellectual was to his nation in the modern
era and how profoundly bereft the intellectual
compelled to emigrate from Nazi Germany was left by
his losses. Emigrant intellectuals, he writes, must
separate themselves from their historical tradition
and collective experience. They must learn new
language, accumulate new experiences, begin a new
life. They suffer not just the loss of possessions
and status, but must assume the burden of new
national culture. Hatred of National Socialism and
liberation from an impossible situation do not
assuage difficulties, especially not for “political
scholars” in his inclusive sense of that term. They
are triply bereft: as individuals with family, as
scientists, and as homo politicus. This is the scope
of the “tragic problem” to which American
universities, according to Neumann’s concluding
words, offered a “happy solution.” This smooth
answer, courteous to his hosts at the University of
Pennsylvania and valedictory in its unexpected
finality, nevertheless leaves many questions about
Neumann’s relationship to exile to be explored.
20. The aim in presenting some vignettes from Franz
Neumann’s rich but abruptly aborted career has been
to illustrate the complex and fluctuating
relationship to exile in the case of a displaced
scholar who is generally considered to be a model
instance of acculturation to American intellectual
and professional life. Neumann portrayed a more
straightforward transition. In the lecture cited
earlier, he speaks of abandoning his status as
politically active exile in England after three
years, having decided that Nazism had changed
Germany so that no internal overthrow was possible
and that political pressure on the English was
useless, since they were rather inclined to
strengthen the Nazis against the socialist
alternative. What he needed, he had concluded, was
a “conscious transplantation of [his] own
existence” for which England was too restrictive.
In America, he contended, especially in the epoch
of the “Roosevelt experiment,” he found the
requisite openness. “The process of
reintegration,” he contended, was “exceedingly
simple,” provided that “one had really made a clean
break with Europe, and particularly with Germany.”
Yet the rest of his talk, especially as he turned
to the problems of German universities, as he had
encountered them as a “German scholar returning to
Germany as a visit,” makes it clear that he could
not have made that “clean break.” He speaks rather
of a “dual role,” both on matters of policy and
intellectual designs, but his actual history shows
that the “integration” he postulates is rather a
conjunction of complementary but disjointed
elements, whose changing juxtapositions correspond
to the unresolved negotiations with his exile
status.
21, In practice, this took the form of complex
mixtures of influence and misunderstandings in his
relations with American colleagues. As a voluble
participant in the initial planning sessions of the
RAND Corporation in 1947, Neumann repeatedly poses
quite loaded questions about American policies
towards non-Communist collectivist and Socialist
developments in Central Europe that appear
incomprehensible to all of the influential social
scientists assembled there, except for the only
other emigrant present, Hans Speier, who smoothes
over Neumann’s implied advocacy of socialist
alternatives. In a memorial delivered, as dictated
by convention, by the Head of his Columbia
department to the assembled council of the Faculty
of Political Science soon after Neumann’s death,
but written in quite an unconventional, almost
confrontational manner by Neumann’s closest friend,
Herbert Marcuse, it is said of him that he “was a
scholar for whom political science was closely
linked to political action” and that “theory was
for him not abstract speculation, not a digest of
various opinions on state, government, etc., but a
necessary guide and precondition for political
action.” His lifelong cause, according to the
friend who knew best how he would want to be
remembered, even in this academic setting, was to
reverse the Weimar failure of social democracy, and
his most pressing concern was the condition of his
time. Referring to the situation in both Germany
and the United States in 1954, Marcuse claims, “He