Behemot : struktura i praksa nacionalsocijalizma

A classic account of the functioning of the government in Nazi Germany, which appeared in a Croatian translation only sixty years later. Like his distant predecessor Thomas Hobbes, who titled his main work after the monster Leviathan, the enemy of power and order, Neumann - also a great political thinker - titled his book after the name of Behemoth, the enemy of chaos, Leviathan's biblical rival.

The huge study "Behemoth" is the result of Neumann's intensive theoretical research into the economic and political roots of totalitarianism in modern industrial society, that is, the identification of the assumptions that enabled the emergence of National Socialism and its takeover of power.

Neumann analyzes the National Socialist system on the basis of rich empirical material as a chaotic system, as a negation of the state, a situation of lawlessness, disorder and anarchy, with a pronounced ambition to establish its hegemony over a vast territory. The book's provocative and controversial central thesis is that the Third Reich did not express a consistent ideology or have a coherent structure. Contrary to superficial depictions of the National Socialist state as a monolithic organization, Neumann shows that it was actually, in a sinister way, pluralistic and that the political will was formed in it through the wild competition of the most powerful social lobbies.