German economist and social scientist who advocated ethical socialist programs in Germany in the 1920s and later in the United States. He was hostile to capitalism but thought it was possible to combine the advantages of a market economy with those of socialism through competing economic units governed by strong state controls.
Heimann studied economics under Franz Oppenheimer and Alfred Weber. He became a Christian Socialist. He supported the SPD in the November Revolution of 1918. Early in 1919 the provisional government in Berlin made him general secretary of the Socialization Commission. Heimann was professor of theoretical and practical social economics at the University of Hamburg from 1925 to 1933. From 1930 he was co-editor of the Neue Blätter f?r den Socialismus with Fritz Klatt and Paul Tillich.
In 1933 Heimann emigrated with his family to the United States. He taught at The New School in New York City. The Fellowship of Socialist Christians was organized in the early 1930s by Reinhold Niebuhr and others with similar views. Later it changed its name to Frontier Fellowship and then to Christian Action. The main supporters of the Fellowship in the early days included Heimann, Paul Tillich, Sherwood Eddy and Rose Terlin. In its early days the group thought capitalist individualism was incompatible with Christian ethics.
Heimann returned to Hamburg in 1961; dying there on 31 May 1967, aged 77.

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