Adolf Löwe

Adolf Löwe – Adolph Löwe/Loewe (1893–1995) – economist and sociologist. Born in Stuttgart, he was educated in Munich and Berlin, gained his doctorate at Tübingen, and served in the German Army, 1914–15. Following a period as an economic adviser to the Weimar Government, 1918–24, and as head of international statistics at the Federal Bureau of Statistics, 1924–6, he taught at the University of Kiel. From 1926 to 1931 he was Director of Research and Educational Studies and Professor of Economics at the Institute of World Economics. He became Professor of Economics, University of Frankfurt (associating with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of sociology), 1931–3 – whereupon, in the spring of 1933, having been dismissed as a ‘dangerous intellectual’ by the Nazis, Löwe (who was Jewish) wisely fled with his family to Britain, where he became a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and taught at the University of Manchester. In Sept. 1939 he became a naturalised British subject. In 1940 he left Britain for the USA, where he became Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York, retiring in 1978. His works include Economics and Sociology: A plea for cooperation in the social sciences (1935), The Price of Liberty: A German on contemporary Britain (1936), On Economic Knowledge: Toward a science of political economics (1965), and The Path of Economic Growth (1976).