Franz Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel on the Liberal Democratic Constitutional Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I want to explore a tension in Anna Saunders's rich argument because it confronts much scholarship critical of what we can think of as the liberal democratic constitutional project (LDCP), and which has its roots in debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sparked by the Marxist critique of capitalism. The tension is between the following two claims that she makes in her article, “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance.” First, LDCP focuses on the formal dimension of institutional design and thereby fails to pay attention to a significant dimension of a constitutional order: its material basis. In this case, the remedy might seem simple: “Pay attention!” The second claim, however, is that the formal structure of LDCP is formal in name only. It has its own material basis in the ideology of neoliberalism. If, then, one is concerned as Saunders is about a material basis that reproduces social inequality and economic exploitation, the remedy is to abandon LDCP. My exploration is through Saunders's attention to the divergent analyses of the Nazi state set out by Franz Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel in the 1930s as the launching pad for her investigation of the structure of thought that underpins LDCP and her suggestion that Fraenkel is responsible for the juridical turn in LDCP. I start with some biography, in part inspired by the way in which Saunders weaves the personal and the political into her narrative. It helps to show that the turn is not in itself problematic and, as I conclude, that material questions need to be posed and answered within the framework of a well-designed constitutional order.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".