Kurt Mandelbaum

Kurt Mandelbaum (born November 13, 1904 in Schweinfurt ; died September 28, 1995 in London ; pseudonyms Erich Baumann and Kurt Baumann), from 1947 Kurt Martin, was a German-British economist.

Life and activity

Training and activity at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research

Almond tree was the son of a doctor. After attending school, he studied economics, philosophy and sociology at the universities of Würzburg and Munich from 1922 to 1923. From 1923 he continued his studies in Berlin, where Werner Sombart and Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz were among his teachers. During this time he worked at the Institute of E Vargas in Berlin.

Through Karl Korsch's mediation , Mandelbaum came to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, whose director Carl Grünberg was in charge of his dissertation on the debate on the problem of imperialism in German social democracy in the decades before the First World War. In 1926 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD.

After receiving his doctorate, Mandelbaum was employed as assistant to Gustav Mayer from 1926 to 1927 and then from 1927 to 1933 as assistant to the deputy director of the institute, Friedrich Pollock, at the Institute for Social Research. During these years he mainly researched questions of economic planning and industrialization in the Soviet Union. In 1929 he also published the letters from Marx and Engels to Nikolai Danielson in German for the first time.

Mandelbaum had been politically organized in the KPD since 1922, from which he was excluded in 1926 because of close contacts with the Korsch group.

Emigration (1933 to 1945)

After the National Socialists came to power and the Institute for Social Research was closed by them, Mandelbaum first went to Geneva, where he worked for a short time at the branch of the Institute for Social Research there. Then he went to Vienna and later to Paris. There he joined the emigrant group New Beginning , in whose programmatic discussions he played an important role.

In 1935 Mandelbaum moved to Great Britain. There he continued to write articles for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung . He was also entrusted with the administration of part of the assets of the Institute for Social Research, which had moved to New York. In 1940 Mandelbaum finally got a job at the Institute of Statistics at Oxford University, where he did research until 1950 - at times as an assistant to William Beveridge . Published in 1945 Mandelbaum his major work that deals with the issue of industrialization of backward areas ( backward areas concerned). With this work he became one of the founders of development economics.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Mandelbaum as an enemy of the state: around 1937 he was officially expatriated. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they will be succeeded by the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

post war period

In 1950 Mandelbaum - who had changed his name to Martin in 1947 - moved to the University of Manchester, where he stayed until 1969. During this time he played a major role in building up the Department of Economics at this university. In addition, from 1964 he was co-editor of the Journal of Development Studies, which he co-founded . Martin's research and teaching activities in Manchester were interrupted by two annual leave of absence, during which he taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University and at the Harvard International Advisory Service in Indonesia.

In 1969, Martin became Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague . There he taught postgraduate students from developing countries on the subject of economic planning. In addition, he published the institute's magazine Development and Change . In 1986 he retired.

Fonts

As an author:

• The discussions within the German social democracy about the problem of imperialism (1895-1914). Frankfurt am Main 1926 (dissertation).
• with Friedrich Pollock : Autarky and planned economy. In: Journal for Social Research . Vol. 2 (1933), pp. 79-103.
• with Gerhard Meyer : On the theory of the planned economy. In: Journal of Social Sciences. 1934, pp. 228-262.
• The Industrialization of Backward Areas. Oxford 1945 (new editions, among others, 1955, 1961).
• Social Democracy and Leninism. Two essays. Rotbuch, Berlin 1974.
• State capitalism? Problems of planning capitalist society. A look back at the discussion in the old Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In: Werner Schulte (Ed.): Sociology in society. Lectures from the events of the sections of the German Society for Sociology, the ad hoc groups and the professional association of German sociologists at the 20th German Sociologists' Day in Bremen 1980. Bremen 1981, pp. 903–907 (as Kurt Martin).

As editor:

• The letters from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Danielson (Nikolaison). Leipzig 1929.

literature

• "I am Still the same, but ...". A Portrait of the Economist Kurt Mandelbaum Based on an Interview with Matthias Greffrath. In: Development and Change. Vol. 10, No. 4, October 1979, pp. 503-513, DOI: 10.1111 / j.1467-7660.1979.tb00048.x (reproduction of an interview broadcast in 1977 by the WDR and the Sender Freies Berlin).
• Martin Jay: Kurt Mandelbaum: His Decade at the Institute of Social Research. In: Development and Change. Vol. 10, No. 4, October 1979, pp. 545-552, DOI: 10.1111 / j.1467-7660.1979.tb00050.x .
• Obituary in: The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies. Vol. 64 (1996), p. 112.
• German Biographical Encyclopedia . Vol. 6. Saur, Munich 1999, p. 760.
• Hans Ulrich Eßlinger, Jörg Glombowski: Martin, Kurt. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 426-432.