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The Will to Chaos and Disorder: The Behemoth as a Model of Political Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2024
Abstract
The history of political economy is tormented by beasts. The most famous is the Leviathan, the giant serpentine monster that figures in Hobbes’s masterpiece of modern political theory. Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert spotlight another sea monster, the Kraken, that giant octopus or squid with a particular morphology (i.e., its tentacles) that so fittingly describes the grip of multinational corporations, stateless financial capital, social media, and tech giants today. But there are still other monsters in the bestiary of political economy. In this essay, I highlight the Behemoth, a land monster that captures another critical dimension of political economy: the willful and intentional deployment of chaos and disorder as a way of governing. Franz Neumann, political and legal theorist and lawyer, Columbia University professor, and member of the Frankfurt School in exile, placed the Behemoth at the heart—and in the title—of his analysis of Germany’s political economy under the Nazi regime. Alongside the Leviathan surveillance state and the many tentacular grips of multinational, social media, and tech Krakens, the Behemoth remains a key model to better understand current forms of capitalism.
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- Research Article
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- © 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Footnotes
Special thanks to Robert Fredona, Walter Friedman, and Sophus Reinert for close readings of a draft; to Mary Hicks, Martin Saar, Fonda Shen, and Carl Wennerlind for productive feedback; and to two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful critiques. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Harvard Business School Conference “Forms of Capitalism,” on May 13, 2022.
References
1 Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy,” History and Theory 59, no. 2 (June 2020): 167–187.
2 Fredona and Reinert, 176.
3 Fredona and Reinert, 177.
4 Fredona and Reinert, 182; Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
5 Fredona and Reinert, “Leviathan and Kraken,” 182–183 (quoting Harcourt, Exposed).
6 Fredona and Reinert, 183 (reproducing logo discussed in Harcourt, Exposed, 78–79).
7 Fredona and Reinert, 183n49.
8 Fredona and Reinert, 183n49.
9 David Armitage, “The Elephant and the Whale: Empires of Land and Sea,” Journal for Maritime Research 9, no. 1 (2007): 23–36.
10 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York, 1942). On Neumann’s life, see David Kettler, “Neumann, Franz 1900–1954,” in 5 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 481–83, ed. William A. Darity Jr. (Somerville, 2008).
11 Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Research IX, no. 2 (1941): 200-225.
12 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Chicago, 1990) (a facsimile of the 1889 edition); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996).
13 Neumann, Behemoth, 459.
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17 See Doreen Lustig, “The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg,” NYU Journal of International Law and Politics 43 (2011): 964–1044.
18 Georges Dumézil, Servius et la fortune: Essai sur la fonction sociale de louange et de blame et sur les éléments indoeuropéens du cens romain (Paris, 1943), 243–244, quoted in Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, eds. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago, 2014), 28.
19 Fredona and Reinert, “Leviathan and Kraken,” 181.
20 Horst Bredekamp, Der Behemoth: Metamorphosen des Anti-Leviathan (Berlin, 2016); Mark R. Sneed, Taming the Beast (Berlin, 2022).
21 Michael V. Fox, “Behemoth and Leviathan,” Biblica 93, no. 2 (2012): 261–267; Lois Drewer, “Leviathan, Behemoth and Ziz: A Christian Adaptation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 148–156; Joseph Gutman, “Leviathan, Behemoth, and Ziz: Jewish Messianic Symbols in Art,” Hebrew Union College Annual 39 (1968): 219–230. See also J. V. Kinneir Wilson, “A Return to the Problem of Behemoth and Leviathan,” Vetus Testamentum, 25, no. 1 (Jan 1975): 1–14.
22 Royce MacGillivray, “Thomas Hobbes’s History of the English Civil War: A Study of Behemoth,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 2 (Apr–June 1970): 179–198.
23 MacGillivray, “Thomas Hobbes’s History of the English Civil War,” 185n28. There are indications elsewhere that Hobbes used the contrast between the Leviathan and the Behemoth as a way of conceptualizing disagreements with other thinkers. See Patricia Springsborg, “Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth,” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 353–375 (as when he challenges the Bishop John Bramhall “to put in print his objections to his religious doctrine” and “offered him the title ‘Behemoth against Leviathan,’” 361).
24 Correspondence from Richard Tuck, dated 10 May 2022 (on file with author).
25 Correspondence from Richard Tuck, dated 10 May 2022 (on file with author).
26 Tomaž Mastnak, “Schmitt’s Behemoth,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 2–3 (2010): 275–296; Armitage, “The Elephant and the Whale.”
27 See Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets (Cambridge, 2011), 128–132.
28 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (New York, 2006).
29 For a debunking of this conventional dichotomy and argument that both capitalist and controlled economies are fully regulated, and both represent forms of state dirigisme, see, generally, Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 176–190; Harcourt, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (New York, 2023), 109–128.
30 See, Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Durham, [1944] 2014); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, [1983] 2000); see, generally, Mary Hicks, “Captivity’s Commerce: The Theory and Methodology of Slaving and Capitalism,” Business History Review 97, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 225–246.
31 Note that, with the exception of the first usage of the term on the first line of the first page of the book, where “late capitalism” appears, Thomas McCarthy uses the term “advanced capitalism” in the rest of his translation of Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975).
32 See Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” 201; and David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley, 1980), 52–53.
33 Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 220.
34 Pollock, 220.
35 Neumann, Behemoth, 476.
36 Neumann, 476.
37 Neumann, 476.
38 Pollock, “State Capitalism.” Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970) studied economics, sociology, and philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and wrote his dissertation on Marx’s labor theory of value (1923). He co-founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt with Felix Weil (who provided funding) in 1923 and served as director of the institute on several occasions, including from 1928 to 1930. He left Germany with the institute when Hitler came to power, going into exile first to Geneva and later to New York City.
39 Pollock, 200.
40 Pollock, 200.
41 Pollock, 200.
42 Pollock, 200.
43 Pollock, 201.
44 Pollock, 207.
45 See, e.g., Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 176–190; Harcourt, Cooperation, 109–128.
46 Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 207.
47 Franz Leopold Neumann (1900–1954) was trained in law and wrote his doctoral thesis on theories of punishment. An active lawyer specializing in labor law, Neumann was the lead attorney to the Social Democratic Party in Germany. He fled Germany with the rise of Hitler and pursued a second doctorate in socio-political studies at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Karl Mannheim and Howard Laski. In 1936, he joined the Frankfurt School in exile at Columbia University as legal advisor and administrator, and later as researcher. He published his magnum opus Behemoth in 1942. During the war, he joined the American intelligence apparatus and became deputy head of the Central European research section of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.
48 Neumann, Behemoth, 354.
49 Neumann, 260–261.
50 Neumann, 261.
51 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 55.
52 Neumann, Behemoth, 351.
53 Neumann, 354.
54 Neumann, 355.
55 Neumann, 355.
56 Neumann, 359.
57 Neumann, 361.
58 Neumann, 361.
59 Neumann, 462.
60 Neumann, 462–463.
61 Neumann, 459.
62 Neumann, 467.
63 Neumann, 459.
64 Fuchs, “The Relevance of Franz L. Neumann’s Critical Theory in 2017”; Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” 95-117, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York, 1985 [1940]), at 96 (emphasis in original); Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 3 (1941): 366-388.
65 Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 290.
66 Adorno quoted in Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 282.
67 Herbert Marcuse, “State and Individual Under National Socialism,” 67-88, in Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism (London, 1998 [1942]).
68 See, generally, Fuchs, “The Relevance of Franz L. Neumann’s Critical Theory in 2017”; Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 52–53; Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 87; Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 282, 288–290.
69 Theodor E. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” in Modern German Sociology, ed. V. Meja, D. Misgeld and N. Stehr (New York, 1987).
70 Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” 243.
71 Adorno, 244.
72 Adorno, 244.
73 Adorno, 245.
74 Adorno, 244.
75 Adorno, 246.
76 Adorno, 245.
77 See, generally, Revolution 6/13 with Martin Saar on “Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund) Student Movement, and the Frankfurt School,” Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/revolution1313/9-13/.
78 Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe, “The Supermanagerial Reich,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 Nov. 2016.
79 Matthew Sparke and Daniel Bessner, “Reaction, Resilience, and the Trumpist Behemoth,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 2 (2019): 533–544.
80 Sparke and Bessner, “Reaction, Resilience, and the Trumpist Behemoth” (drawing on Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (New York, 2018)); see also Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, “Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster,” Dissent (Summer 2019), accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/political-scenarios-for-climate-disaster.
81 Daniel Bessner and Matthew Sparke, “Nazism, Neoliberalism, and the Trumpist Challenge to Democracy,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49, no. 6 (2017):1214–1223, 1214.
82 Andreas Huyssen, “Behemoth Rises Again.”
83 Huyssen, “Behemoth Rises Again.”
84 See, e.g., Dylan Matthews, “Is Trump a Fascist? 8 Experts Weight In,” Vox, 23 Oct. 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fascism-signs-donald-trump (on the concept of “fascism”); Bernard E. Harcourt, “How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right,” The New York Review of Books, 29 Nov. 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/29/how-trump-fuels-the-fascist-right/; and Bernard E. Harcourt, “The Fight Ahead,” Boston Review, 7 Jan 2021, https://bostonreview.net/articles/bernard-e-harcourt-fight-ahead/I (on the concept of “white nationalism”); Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (New York, 2018) (on the concepts of “counterrevolution” and “internal enemies”).
85 Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (New York, 2018); Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Berkeley, 2020); Matthews, “Is Trump a Fascist?”; Michael Martin, “Fascism Scholar Says US is ‘Losing its Democratic Status,’” NPR, 6 Sep. 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/910320018; Cailin Potami, “Federico Finchelstein on His New Book, A Brief History of Fascist Lies,” The New School, 29 June 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, http://socialresearchmatters.org/federico-finchelstein-brief-history-fascist-lies/; David A. Bell, “Trump Is a Racist Demagogue. But He’s Not a Fascist,” Washington Post, 26 Aug. 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/26/trump-not-fascist/; Spencer Bokat-Lindell, “Fascism: A Concern,” New York Times, 30 July 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/fascism-us.html; Samuel Moyn, “The Trouble With Comparisons,” New York Review of Books, 19 May 2020, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/.
86 Neumann, Behemoth, 467.
87 See, e.g., Bernard E. Harcourt, “Dismantling/Neoliberalism,” 21–32, in Carceral Notebooks, Volume 6, 2010: Neoliberalism and Crisis, 22–26, accessed 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn6_Harcourt.pdf; Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 40–44 (on “neoliberal penality”).
88 See, e.g., David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2018); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order (New York, 1999); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (July 2002): 349–379; James Ferguson, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode, 41 (2010): 166–184; The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA, 2009).
89 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Common: On Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Matthew MacLellan (London, 2019).
90 Phillip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London, 2013).
91 Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” Critical Times 1, no. I (April 2018): 60–79.
92 This is the paradox that gives rise to “neoliberal penality,” the self-contradictory juxtaposition of an incompetent state in economic regulation but a robust police state on security matters. See Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 31–52.
93 Irving Louis Horowitz, Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology (New York, 1999).
94 Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York, 2019); Jehangir Malegem, The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe (Durham, 2013). There were, of course, many earlier as well in the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Curtis Dahl, “Moby Dick’s Cousin Behemoth,” American Literature 31, no. 1 (1959): 21–29; Cornelius Mathews, Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders, reprinted in The Various Writings of Cornelius Mathews (New York, 1843), 85–119.
95 In this respect, I agree and argue that the term “capitalism” should be replaced by “state dirigisme.” See Harcourt, Cooperation, 109–121.
96 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 [1941]); see generally The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, “The Frankfurt School Critique of National Socialism and State Capitalism,” Coöperism 8/13, Dec. 6, 2023, available online at https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/8-13/.
97 See Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
98 See Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago, 1986).
99 Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, 2009); Thomas Wheatland, “The Frankfurt School’s Invitation from Columbia University: How the Horkheimer Circle Settled on Morningside Heights,” German Politics & Society, 22, no. 3 (72) (Fall 2004): 1–32; Thomas Wheatland, “Critical Theory on Morningside Heights: From Frankfurt Mandarins to Columbia Sociologists,” German Politics & Society 22, no. 4 (73) (Winter 2004): 57–87.
100 Wheatland, “Critical Theory on Morningside Heights,” 21.
101 Wheatland, “The Frankfurt School’s Invitation from Columbia University,” 20.
102 Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 200.
103 Pollock, 209.
104 Friedrich Pollock, Die planwirtschaftlichen Versuche in der Sowjetunion, 1917-1927 [Attempts at planned economy in the Soviet Union, 1917–1927] (Leipzig, 1929).
105 Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 208.
106 Pollock, 209.
107 Pollock, 209.
108 Pollock, 209 (emphasis added).
109 Pollock, 210.
110 See Pollock, 222.
111 See Pollock, 222.
112 See Pollock, 215n2.
113 Pollock, 216.
114 See Pollock, 204n1 and 212n1, where Pollock uses “the literature on socialist planning” to discuss the question of “distribution under state capitalism.” Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 204n1, 211, 212n1.
115 See Pollock, 221n1.
116 Pollock, 217.
117 Pollock, 217.
118 Neumann, Behemoth, 476.
119 Neumann, 476.
120 Neumann, 476, emphasis added.