Adolph Lowe

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Adolph Lowe (born March 4, 1893 in Stuttgart , † June 3, 1995 in Wolfenbüttel ; born Adolf Löwe ) was a German sociologist and economist .

biography

Löwe studied sociology and economics first in Munich, then with Franz Oppenheimer in Berlin. In the 1920s he was a staunch social democrat as a supporter of religious socialism . From 1922 he worked in the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Weimar Republic . With his work on the current state of business cycle research (1925), Löwe became the focus of the business cycle discussion during the Weimar period. The weaknesses of the monetary business cycle theories were worked out by his student Fritz Burchardt (1928). With his business-cycle-theoretical considerations, Löwe completed his habilitation in 1926 at the University of Kiel . In close cooperation with Ernst Wagemann , the head of the Reich Statistical Office, he was actively involved in the development of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) , which was founded in 1925 based on the model of the economic research institute established in Harvard in 1917 .

From 1926 to 1931, Löwe was head of the economic department of the Kiel World Economic Institute ; Employees included Gerhard Colm , Hans Neisser , Jacob Marschak and Wassily Leontief . The work of the so-called "Kiel School of Growth and Business Theory" has received international attention to this day.

From 1926 to 1933 he first taught economic theory and sociology in Kiel and then political economy at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , where he worked with his school friend Max Horkheimer and also with Paul Tillich , Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno came into contact. After the National Socialists came to power, he first emigrated to England and taught from 1933 to 1940 (initially as a Rockefeller scholar) in Manchester a . a. Political philosophy until, despite his naturalization, now as Adolph Lowe, he was excluded from military service as an "enemy alien" and went to New York .

There he taught economics from 1941 to 1963 at the New School for Social Research , where many other European emigrants such as Hans Staudinger , Frieda Wunderlich , Hannah Arendt , Hans Jonas , Max Wertheimer , Erich von Hornbostel , Arthur Feiler , Franco Modigliani , Hans Speier , Emil Lederer and Alfred Schütz taught and worked. In the Institute of World Affairs there , he worked on behavioral economic theory, which can serve as a bridge between sociology and economics. Until 1978 he led a seminar at the New School.

His students include a. Marion Countess Dönhoff , Karl Schiller and Robert Heilbroner .

Honors

  • In 1983 the University of Bremen made Lowe its first honorary doctorate. In 1983 he returned to Germany, where he died in 1995 at the age of 102.
  • In the 1980s he was made an honorary member of the Frankfurt Economic Science Society (fwwg), the alumni organization of the Economics Department at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
  • In 1984 Federal President Richard von Weizäcker presented him with the Federal Cross of Merit .

Fonts (selection)

  • Unemployment and Crime (1914)
  • (together with Christian Labor): Economic Demobilization (1916)
  • How is business cycle theory even possible? (1926)
  • Economics and Sociology (1935)
  • The Price of Liberty (1937)
  • The Universities in Transformation (1940)
  • On Economic Knowledge (1965) (German edition: Politische Ökonomik , 1965)
  • The Path of Economic Growth (1976)
  • Essays in political economics. Public control in a democratic society (1987)
  • Has Freedom a Future? (1988) (German edition: Does Freedom Have a Future?, 1990)

literature

  • Harald Hagemann , Heinz D. Kurz : Employment, Distribution and Business Cycle. On the political economy of modern society. Commemorative publication for Adolph Lowe. Bremen 1984. ISBN 3-926570-09-1 .
  • Harald Hagemann (Ed.): Political economics in retrospect. Essays in memory of Adolph Lowe , Elgar, Cheltenham 1990, ISBN 1-85898-057-7 .
  • Ernst Bloch dedicated his Atheism in Christianity to him , On the Religion of Exodus and the Reich , Frankfurt 1977.
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn : The Philosophical Economist. On the intellectual biography of Adolph Lowe. 240 pages, May 1996. ISBN 3-89518-081-5 .
  • Volker Caspari, Bertram Schefold : Franz Oppenheimer and Adolph Lowe. Two economists from Frankfurt University. 312 pages, 1996. ISBN 3-89518-088-2
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn: Expulsion and acculturation of German economists after 1933 using the example of AL and the 'University in Exile' at the New School for Social Research in New York in: The Exodus from Nazi Germany and the consequences. Jewish scientists in exile. Edited by Marianne Hassler, Attempto, Tübingen 1997. ISBN 3-89308-265-4 .
  • Sven Papcke : German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-593-34862-4 (including Chapter III: Conformity as the Price of Freedom? On the problems of Germans with politics. On the current relevance of a study by Adolf Löwe. Pp. 59-76).

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn: Economic theories as political interests. Academic economics in Germany 1918-1933. Frankfurt / Main 1981. Allen Oakley: Schumpeter's Theory of Capitalist Motion. A Critical Exposition and Reassessment. Edwar Elgar: 1990. ISBN 1-85278-055-X . P. 19f
  2. ↑ List of honorary doctorates from the University of Bremen ( Memento from June 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Lowe, Adolph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leo, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist and economist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart , Baden-Wuerttemberg , Germany
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1995
Place of death Wolfenbüttel , Lower Saxony , Germany