Franz Neumann, The Democratic and The Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, edited with a Preface by Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, Illinois: The Falcon's Wing Press/ The Free Press, 1957) (From "Approaches to the Study of Political Power": "Political power is social power focused on the state. It involves control of other men for the purpose of influencing the behavior of the state, its legislative, administrative and judicial activities. Since political power is control of other men, political power (as contrasted with power over external nature) is always a two-sided relationship. Man is not simply a piece of external nature; he is an organism endowed with reason. although frequently not capable of, or prevented from, acting rationally. Consequently, those who wield political power are compelled to create emotional and rational responses in those whom they rule, inducing them to accept, implicitly or explicitly, the commands of the rulers. Failure to evoke emotional or intellectual responses in the ruled compels the rule to resort to simple violence, ultimately to liquidation." Id. at 3, 3-5."[The liberal attitude's] sole concern is the creation of fences around political power which is, allegedly, distrusted. Its aim is the dissolution of power into legal relationships, the elimination of the element of personal rule, and the substitution of the rule of law in which all relationships are to become purposive-rational, that is, predictable and calculable. In reality, of course, this is in large measure an ideology tending (often unintentionally) to prevent the search for the locus of political power and to render secure its actual holders. Power cannot be dissolved in law." Id. at 6-7. Therein lies one of the many naive conceits of legal education as general pursued at the typical law school: that many, if not most, problems come down to identifying the the appropriate legal rules. At their core, most issues come down to who has the power and who does not. The legal rules legislated, decreed, or administered will favor, in time, those with political power. Law is politic. From "Intellectual and Political Freedom": "To be sure, we know that since the French Revolution anti-liberal and anti-democratic theories have been propagated which champion the thesis that from democracy there must necessarily emerge the rule of the mob, a bloodthirsty mob which, in order to be able to exercise its rule, places a tyrant at its head. The total state then appears as the necessary fulfillment of democracy. De Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortes, Spengle, Ortega y Gasset repeat this idea in one form or another." "Most of them appeal to a supposedly Augustinian anthropology and claim that man, corrupt in his nature, must necessarily create a totally corrupt political regime of mob rule when, as with democracy, he must stand on his own feet." "The possibility of mob rule exists. As a rule, those who advocate this so-called Augustinian anthropology are after all the same who also strive to convert their theory into reality through propaganda and politics,; while on the contrary it seems to be the duty precisely of the intellectual, to oppose the tendencies of mob rule." "This tendency--but it is only a tendency, no more--is indeed inherent in democracy. It means that a purely democratic system has conformist tendencies, that is to say, that the fact of mass rule presses upon the whole intellectual and artistic life of the nation, in order to create a conformist monolithic culture." "These tendencies are not dangerous in themselves. There is anti-intellectualism in every mass movement. The suspicion that the intellectual will refuse to play the game is always present. Rightly or wrongly the mass sees the intellectual as Socrates had asked him to be: as a stranger, a metic, who is the name of truth must not and cannot fully identify himself with any political system." Id. at 201, 210-211.).
