Biographical Information K. William Kapp (continued)
In 1937 Kapp received a scholarship from the Frankfurt School, which had emigrated and was now situated at Columbia University (New York City) under the name Institute for Social Research. This allowed the Kapps to emigrate to the United States of America, where Kapp worked at Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York and Wesleyan University in Connecticut for almost three decades as lecturer, assistant professor, and full professor. There is evidence that Kapp took interest in the developing discussion between the German intellectuals at Columbia and those German economists who formed the new graduate faculty at the New School. The economist of the Institute for Social Research, F. Pollock, was his close friend since his dissertational work and also a close friend of A. Lowe, who was by then a leading economist at the New School. Kapp’s work from this time period shows the influence of the Frankfurt School, i.e., M. Horckheimer, T. Adorno, and especially E. Fromm, as well as that of the leading social scientists K. Goldstein, A. Maslow, K. Polanyi, P. Tillich, and W. Weisskopf, to name but a few. Importantly, at this point Kapp’s European research background started to blend with American intellectual movements, namely the works of T.B. Veblen’s and J.M. Clark’s American Institutionalism and the Pragmatism of J. Dewey. This creative intellectual environment was ideal for the development of Kapp’s institutional ecological economics, which began with his most famous book “The Social Costs of Private Enterprise” (1950). This book was later revised, enlarged and published under the title “The Social Costs of Business Enterprise” (1963) to indicate the Veblenian spirit of the work (cf. “The Theory of Business Enterprise”). In 1971 the original version of “The Social Costs of Private Enterprise” was published with a significantly enlarged introductionby Kapp, reflecting the latest stage of his theoretical development. The second main strand of Kapp’s work sprang from his interest in integrating social science, leading to the publication of “Towards a Science of Man in Society” (1961), a work of large scope, ranging from economic and cultural anthropology to the behavioural sciences.
Between 1958 and 1964 Kapp and his wife undertook three research journeys to India and the Philippines, during which they laid the foundations for ecological development economics. Applying the theory of social costs to problems of economic development, Kapp’s “ecological development approach” can be considered as a forerunner of “sustainable development.” Since this time Kapp also corresponded with G. Myrdal and adopted his principle of “Circular Cumulative Causation” as a research hypothesis.
