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

became ever more apprehensive of the intensified

anti-democratic and neo-fascist trends the world

over. He did not compromise; he did not recant.”

In that sense, Neumann never ceased to be an exile

from Nazi Germany.