Curious how practically all the literature dealing with the neo-Marxist revival of state theory in the 1960s/70s sidesteps Neumann and Kirchheimer. The narrative seems to go: Lenin > stamocap instrumentalism > rediscovery of Gramsci > Miliband, Poulantzas, Anderson, etc.

It says something about the real lack of dialogue b/w German and French social theory on this topic, more specifically b/w Frankfurt School and post-Althusserians/neo-Gramscians. Poulantzas cites Neumann, Habermas, and Offe a couple of times, but that's about all I've seen.

Part of it has to do with the use of Weber. The Frankfurters appropriated a lot of his ideas, especially on bureaucracy and legal rationality, whereas the neo-Gramscians rejected elite-oriented explanations of the state.

Part of it also has to do with Althusser's bizarre dismissal of the Frankfurt School, who I'm not convinced he actually read. On the Frankfurt side, Alfred Schmidt's History and Structure is the only book I'm aware of that deals with the Althusserians.

On the state, my hunch is that there is something to be explored b/w Poulantzas and Neumann, bon fascism/exceptional state and on the autonomy of law. But I haven't read enough Neumann to be certain yet. And the methodological presuppositions might just be too different.

Interestingly, in his posthumous essay "Research Note on the State and Society" (and probably elsewhere), Poulantzas criticizes both the juridical-legal emphasis on the state in Germany, and the relative provincialism of French social scientific research on the state

Perhaps this would be a reason for why a broadly Poulantzian approach would be incompatible with that of Neumann. But I wonder if it's possible to read against the grain the juridical-legal in Neumann as a results of complex articulations of diffuse material processes.