Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann's case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct.
Learning from Franz Neumann pays special attention to Neumann's efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking.