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PARTISAN REVIEW
LOCATING THE ENEMY
1. The Nazi Behemoth Dissected
Behemoth:
Th~
Structure and Practice of National Socialism. By Franz
Neumann. Oxford Press. $4.00.
1: Franz Neumann's book is at once a definitive analysis of the Ger·
man Reich and a basic contribution to the social sciences. No book could
be both these things and not contain poltical directives. In looking closely
at one complex object, Neumann reveals in sensitive outline many features
of all modern social structure. He has that knack of generalized des.crip·
tion that describes more than its immediate object; and he sees many
things in that object, Germany since
1918,
as "the specific working out of
a general trend." To lift his style of analysis above the mere depictive and
into understanding he pauses in a concrete potrayal to present a typology
of possibilities. For example, of the relations of a state to a party in any
one-party system, of kinds of imperialism, of the relations between bank–
ing and industrial capital, or of political patterns
vis-a-vis
the Reich and
the various sections of her empire. Almost a third of Neumann's sentences
are comparatively informed, and when he uses history, as in the reweav–
ing of tjle rope of charismatic legitimations, he always comes up to face
the day before yesterday now more clearly understood.
When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them,
something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae;
some men become reporters. To time observation with thought so as to
mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult
problem. Its solution lies in the
using
of intellectual residues of social–
'history, not jettisoning them except in precise confrontation with events.
Franz Neumann's book represents the best tradition of the social
sciences in Germany, which came to full stature during the Twenties. He
looks down a neo-Marxist slant further subtilized by Max Weber's dis–
tinctions and deepened by a sociologically oriented psychiatry. His think–
ing is thus sensitively geared to great structural shifts and to happenings
in the human mind.
Such reporting as his book accomplishes is of central facts tied down
by the best doctilltentation available. And there is no repeating of for–
mulae in it: Marx may bear a Nineteenth Century trademark in some
matters, but, as Neumann again makes clear by a fresh intellectual act, the
technique, the elements, and the drive of his thinking is more than ever
relevant, and right now. There are so many who have "forgotten" what
they once half understood and who take the easy ways out that it is down·
right refreshing to experience a book which displays a really analytic
heritaqe with perception and with craftsmanship.
II: Neumann's Germany is a type of capital-ism; he calls it "totali–
tarian monopolistic capitalism." Those who would deny this characteriza·
tion are forced by Neumann's study (a) to do some tall (and narrow)
defining of "capitalism" which can be justified against his careful usage
