Charting the Road to Behemoth's Lair: F. A. Hayek's and Franz L. Neumann's Studies of Totalitarian Economic Governance

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract Did capitalism or socialism produce the conditions favorable to National Socialism? This question has been asked and answered since the 1930s, and the historian Benjamin Carter Hett has called the answer a “historical Rorschach test” due to its divisive nature. This article puts two original figures in this debate, the so-called neoliberal F. A. Hayek and the neo-Marxist Franz L. Neumann, into conversation as a means of exploring this question and finding common ground beyond it. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Neumann's revised Behemoth were both published in 1944 and have informed subsequent attempts to understand the roots of totalitarianism. Renewed interest in each scholar highlights their relevance to our own time, yet no work has addressed the complementary elements of their thought, nor their overlapping time at the London School of Economics. Despite Hayek's and Neumann's distinct answers to the capitalism/socialism question, they shared common criticisms of the Nazi regime's fragmented sovereignty, its political compromise between competing factions, and its particularistic application of legal principles. These features of what Hayek termed a “middle way” and Neumann termed a “polyocracy” created conditions favorable to totalitarianism. Hayek's and Neumann's insights foreground issues that continue to concern us today, irrespective of capitalist or socialist allegiances.