Paul Alexander Baran Papers

Correspondence, audio recordings and photographs of Paul Alexander Baran (1909-1964).

Paul Alexander Baran was a professor of economics at Stanford from 1949 until his death of a heart attack in 1964. His most important works were The Political Economy of Growth, published in 1957, and Monopoly Capital, co-authored with Paul M. Sweezy, published posthumously in 1965 (both published by Monthly Review Press). Paul Baran was an expert in comparative economic systems (capitalism and socialism), and considered himself a Marxist. Born in Nikolaev, Russia, in 1909, Baran received his education in Germany, obtaining a Ph. D. in economics from the University of Berlin in 1931. Having to leave Germany with the rise of Hitler, Baran spent a brief time in the Soviet Union, and then some years in France, Poland, and Britain, working for his family's timber business. He then emigrated to the United States in 1938, and served in the U.S. Army during the second world war as an expert on Russian and German economics. After the war, Baran worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank, and after being invited to Stanford as a visiting lecturer in the summer of 1948, was hired as an associate professor, and granted tenure in 1951. Baran became quite a controversial figure at Stanford after expressing his support for the Cuban Revolution in 1959. He remained one of the economics department's most popular professors until his death in 1964.