Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2009
The rise of European fascism in the 1920s and '30s triggered the greatest migration of intellectual capital the world has ever known. This paper is concerned with the German-speaking economists who formed the core of the original Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Among émigré economists of the interwar period, those who found refuge at the New School exerted a distinctive influence on American economics, partly owing to their concentration at a single institution, and partly by virtue of the character and quality of their work. The paper has three aims: to provide an overview of the contributions of these economists, to assess their impact on American economics, and to account for the apparent evaporation of their legacy after the onset of the Cold War.